


Landed All in Loneliness

by Juliet_Anders



Category: Toy Story (Movies)
Genre: Buzz is not a knight in shining armor but neither is he a real space ranger, Epic quest, F/M, Post-Movie: Toy Story 4, another landfill adventure, but he can take some good cues from both archetypes, jessie is a damsel she is in distress she's handling as best it can be handled, locked in storage, my interpretation of a Toy Story 5, northern nevada, the return of Space Ranger Buzz, this time with gladiators, toy dismemberment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24659476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juliet_Anders/pseuds/Juliet_Anders
Summary: Bonnie goes off for her Gap Year, but leaves Jessie trapped in her worst nightmare. Buzz, presumed dead, has a daunting journey of deserts and cities separating him from home. But between the junkyard emperor, ferocious creatures, and time he keeps losing to bouts of old Space Ranger delusion, his "presumed" death might become reality at any time.
Relationships: Jessie/Buzz Lightyear
Comments: 21
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In order to read this you gotta shake my hand and agree that Buzz magically got his whole entire brain cell back after TS4.
> 
> Other than that, this takes place several years after TS4. The title comes from the poem Errantry, by J.R.R. Tolkien, and this chapter’s title comes from the song Quiet, by Lights. I’m gonna keep naming the chapters based on songs I was listening to at the time of writing. Maybe I’ll put a whole playlist on Spotify up at the end of the story if anyone wants to hear.

I’m Not Yours and You’re Not Mine, but We Can Sit and Pass the Time

The mountains called the Anderson family, and eventually, they went.

Bonnie thrived in Nevada for her last two years of high school. She rode horses the first summer, living out her Sheriff Jessie stories beneath the Sierras. She saw the Milky Way for the first time on a class ski trip to the lake in the darkest, clearest dead of winter. Under the moonless, star-filled sky, a spacewalk couldn’t have provided a clearer view. She published her first short story in the high school literary journal. She helped her dad rebuild the house they’d moved to on the foothills of the mountains. And most thrilling of all, she’d graduated high school not just with honors, but with a job offer thanks to her home construction experience and a community college certificate in welding.

(She _was_ going to be a writer, she and her parents agreed. But they also agreed that it was a good idea for a writer to have a trade.)

She skyped her best friends back in California regularly to tell them everything - all the triumphs and accomplishments, all the big dreams she was turning into realities - and her toys were glad to hear about it all, even secondhand. 

Secondhand was the only way they heard anything from Bonnie these days. Since she’d first put their cardboard moving box into her new closet two years ago, she’d only opened the box once - that night, to take Totoro out to sleep with. She hadn’t looked at them since.

“She just doesn’t seem old enough to go to San Francisco herself,” Buttercup worried, peeking through the slats in the closet door into the warmly lit bedroom. Bonnie sat on her bed, tapping away at her laptop, her writing playlist covering the toys’ whispers.

“She wouldn’t seem old enough no matter how long she stayed here,” Buzz reminded them. He’d known Andy was ready for college when he’d gone, but even though children changed so rapidly, it was so hard to ever see them as the grownups they became, when they loved the children they’d been so much. “And she’s not going to San Francisco alone.”

Bullseye headbutted him on the shoulder, grateful for the reminder.

“I know, she’s living in a group house, with the other actors,” Buttercup said.

“ _Activists_ ,” Pricklepants corrected.

“I thought they were building houses, not acting.”

“They’re not _acting_ , they’re _being active_ against homelessness,” Dolly corrected. “We can sneak out tonight to read the pamphlet again if you’re still confused.”

“The pamphlet didn’t explain why she had to go all the way to San Francisco to build houses,” Buttercup sighed. “Aren’t there homeless people in Nevada?”

“She’s taking her first steps to chart her life’s course,” Buzz said. He glanced at Dolly, who nodded, glad for his input. The few toys who still remained still looked to her for leadership, but she hadn’t gone through seeing a kid off to adulthood before. Buzz had. “It’s hard not to worry, but she’s becoming the grownup _we_ helped her realize she wanted to be. We can be proud of that, and proud of her.”

“Even if we’re gonna miss her.”

Jessie surprised everyone by piping up. The others crowded at the closet door’s slats, but she remained in the shadows, stroking her braid in quiet anxiety.

The rest of the toys murmured their subdued agreement and turned back to the view of their kid, but Buzz kept his eyes on Jessie, concerned.

“Which story do you think she’s working on?” Pricklepants whispered to Dolly and Buttercup, as Bonnie reread a paragraph, took out a comma, then put the comma back in. “The sword and sorcery isekai? The space pirate swashbuckler?”

“Nah, the urban racing scifi has the strongest legs,” Dolly said. “Dystopia is so big now. She’s gotta strike while that iron’s hot.”

Buzz left the closet door to take Jessie’s hand. “How are you holding up?” he asked.

Jessie controlled her breathing. It was easier to do when Buzz was holding her hand, giving her something real to feel that wasn’t just her anxiety over the future. She let go of her braid, to give him both of her hands.

Buzz was so good at seeing the bigger picture, the one in which they were valuable to their kid’s life even after the kid wasn’t a kid anymore. They _could_ be proud that Bonnie was about to go out into the world, to live a life that helped others, that helped her reach her creative dreams. They’d been such big parts of so much of that creativity, even if they were done now.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t also worried, or already a little hurt at being about to be given up again by a kid who hadn’t touched any of them in years. Jessie had never forgotten his look of hurt and dismay when Andy had put him into storage. He was putting aside his own anxiety to support Jessie, and the others, and Jessie wanted to support him back.

“She is a good kid, isn’t she?” she said, and it was all she could say without choking up. What else could she say? That she didn’t know how she was going to do this again, and again, always wondering each time when they’d be thrown away and how they’d avoid the incinerator again? Or would they be lucky enough to be donated to a school, where she could keep her friends close, or a store, where they’d have to escape together, or would they get the vaulted few years in an attic until Bonnie’s kids came to claim them for a whole new life -?

“Yeah, she is,” Buzz agreed, eager with warmth to focus on that. “She’s a good kid - and Andy was a good kid. So was Emily, right?”

“She was,” Jessie agreed. It was less hard to talk about Emily, now that she also had Andy and Bonnie to talk about. The distinct ways they’d each been great kids were nice to remember, even with a future without any of them looming so large. “I can’t wait to tell you all about her,” she said, lifting Buzz's hand to her cheek, relaxing a little as he followed her lead and let her rest her face in his palm.

“I can’t wait to hear all about her,” Buzz agreed. Once upon a time, life had only been worth living if he was there for a kid who loved him, but now, at the natural end of that love - a second time - life still seemed bright if he took all the good he had ever done with Andy, and Bonnie, and kept those memories alive with Jessie. “I still have some stories about Andy you missed,” he added, as Jessie smiled with real comfort for the first time in perhaps a week. “We’ll always have done a great job with them.” 

The comfort reached Jessie. A future without a kid was frightening, but her past with her kids was so warm and real and true. It would always be with her - and if Buzz were always with her, nothing about being a lost toy could really be too bad to weather.

“ _You_ did good, Spaceman -” Jessie started to say, when the knock at the door cut her off.

“Honey? Are you busy?”

“It’s Mom,” Dolly said, in a hushed tone, ushering them all to creep silently back to their box. Mom, recently become the Tidier, might unexpectedly open a closet at any time.  


Buzz waited as the others crept in the quietest line possible. A thought that had been bothering him recently wouldn’t go away.

Mom could decide to do anything with their box. She could take them downstairs now, or take them to the attic now, or Bonnie could decide to pack one toy and not another tomorrow. That was a lot of possibilities, a lot of potential problems to resolve.

But the closet was full of hiding places where a toy or two could go unnoticed for another day or so. He, Jessie, and Bullseye could hide long enough to figure out Bonnie’s plans for them, and decide whether to go and be Lost Toys a little ahead of schedule. They’d cut so many other possibilities off if they did -

“Buzz!” Jessie cut into his thoughts. She waited at the edge of the box, as Bullseye leaped inside. “Aren’t you coming?”

They were likely going to be thrifted. Once Bonnie made that choice to give them up, they could go be Lost Toys without causing her any distress, or distressing their own instincts. But going in the box made so many variables possible, while hiding now ensured they’d get the fate they wanted.

A good toy would get in the box, and wait for whatever decision Bonnie made. A good toy following his toy instincts would respect what the kid decided to do with them, keep or split or sell or otherwise, no matter what that choice was, and solve whatever problem it presented once it was presented to him.

But if that choice involved splitting him up from Jessie, he didn’t want Bonnie to have the means to make it. Hiding in the closet would prevent that.

The others were already in the box, waiting on Jessie, who waited on Buzz. Good toys waited for their kid to decide what to do with them. Good toys didn’t take their fate into their own hands. _Space rangers did that._

 _You’re not a space ranger,_ Buzz reminded himself again. He managed to say it to himself without feeling bitter so often. He barely managed it now.

“Come in,” Bonnie called, pausing her playlist.

“Buzz!” Jessie waved him over, urgent.

He ran over to the box and helped Jessie up, taking her assist over the edge of the box as Bonnie’s old mountain house door creaked open.

“Oh, are you writing? Am I interrupting?”

“No, it’s fine, I’m just outlining,” Bonnie said. Mom padded over in her slippers on the hardwood and the bed squeaked as she sat down at the foot.

“Which one, the girl who finds out she’s a queen in secret, or the flying pirates?”

“The mermaid one,” Bonnie said.

“Oh!” Pricklepants gasped. “I thought we were doomed never to know Queen Salinity’s fate!”

“Bonnie, you haven’t done any packing for San Francisco yet,” Mom pointed out.

“Nuh uh, I packed the books I want,” Bonnie said. “Other than that, all I’m taking is my laptop, my bed stuff, and Totoro,” Bonnie said. “And my toolbox. But I’m not packing all that until it’s time to leave.”

“What about your clothes, your toys? You’ve still got to figure out which of those to donate to the thrift shop.”

“Mom,” Bonnie groaned. “Why can’t I just leave them in the attic?”

“If they don’t bring you joy now, they’re not going to bring you joy after you’ve gotten older.”

The toys all gasped as one. “We could,” Dolly exhaled. It was the only time she’d ever spoken against Mom.

“Does my room have to become a guest room?” Bonnie sighed. “It’s going to be so weird not to have my own room to come back to.”

“Honey this room will always be yours first,” Mom assured her. “But while you’re not using it, it would be nice to be able to let Grandma and Grandpa sleep here without surrounding them with Kpop posters.”

“Grandma might like them,” Bonnie objected. “Who knows? Maybe Grandpa does too.”

“Plenty of girls would like your old clothes,” Mom chided. “And some kids would enjoy your toys more than you have been.”

“I barely have any toys anymore,” Bonnie shrugged. “They’re all in the box in the closet.”

The toys all dropped motionless as Mom walked over.

“Oh, the old guard,” Mom sighed, pulling the box flaps open. “Whatever happened to your dinosaurs?”

“Pretty sure Mason still has them,” Bonnie said, tapping a few letters into her word document. “They’re living their best life with all his old Battlesaurs.”

“I wouldn’t want to try and declutter that boy’s room,” Mom said, picking up the box. “Oh, you told me some of your first stories with these,” she sighed, as she set the box on Bonnie’s bed.

Bonnie peered over the box. Jessie was glad she’d chosen to fall face-down. She only caught a glimpse of Bonnie’s cheek, still a little baby round, her undercut freshly buzzed, her hair dyed as purple as Dolly’s and cut to floof effortlessly on top. She had been so sweet and so fun. Now she was still sweet, still fun, but not to them.

“Yeah, they helped unlock the imagination,” Bonnie said. The warmth in her tone filled them all, suddenly, like a sunbeam flashing through the clouds -

The brief warmth vanished as Bonnie sat back, her interest spent. “They can all go to the thrift store,” she said,

“All of them?” Mom said, looking over the box. “So spartan.”

“Hey, _you’re_ the tidying queen,” Bonnie threw back. “And I’m not going to have much room in SanFran. I’m sharing my room with two other girls. There might not even be space for Totoro if he didn’t double as a pillow!”

“Don’t you want to thank them before you donate them?” Mom asked. “They gave you so much.”

Bonnie snorted. “Thank them? They’re just plastic.” There was no dismissiveness in her voice. She wasn’t diminishing them intentionally. She tapped her temple. “What I got from them is all up here now.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” Mom said, looking from the box to Bonnie as Bonnie stared at her laptop screen, absorbed. She paused, then asked - “So, have you figured out Queen Salinity’s decision?”

Bonnie sighed. “No, I still have no idea how to end this book,” she nearly growled. “But I figured out how she befriends the mysterious loner and learns her tragic secret, and I wanted to get it down before I put that one on the back burner.”

“Well as soon as you know, I want to know,” Mom said. She lifted the box of toys and whisked them away. “Don’t stay up ALL night again. You promised to help finish the deck tomorrow!”

“I know!”

Dimness fell on the toys as Mom closed the box. A sharpie squeaked against the exterior and Mom set them down again, light still streaming in through the seams of the boxflaps.

Bonnie’s playlist resumed. Dolly stood fabric-silent up to peer through the pinhole they’d popped out of the cardboard.

“She left us by the bedroom door,” Dolly whispered.

Bonnie hummed along to her music. The toys stood up quietly, even Jessie, though her legs felt shaky beneath her and she wanted to stay seated. Beneath Buttercup, in the box, Buzz had grabbed her hand and still hadn’t let her go as she wrapped her free hand around his.

Dolly stepped away from the pinhole, her stare suddenly blank.

“Could we -” Buzz gestured to the pinhole behind her. “Could we get a last look?”

“It’s facing the wrong way,” Dolly said. “You can’t see her from this angle.”

None of the toys said anything, as they absorbed their reality.

Bonnie had given them up. They were done. No more wondering who would be put in the attic, who would be on a thrift store shelf, and who would go to San Francisco.  


They had their answer, whether they liked it or not. And they’d had their last glimpse of their kid.

“Now we’ll never know if the Megashark gets revenge on the finning boat,” Pricklepants lamented. “I was desperate to know if Queen Salinity would quench his thirst for vengeance with Sirenian justice, or if the ocean would boil with the entrails of all humanity.”

“She has such a way with describing viscera,” Dolly sighed, with sorrow and pride.

Bullseye nickered sadly, and Buttercup translated, “It would have been nice to have been thanked.”

They all fell silent, realizing suddenly how nice it _would_ have been to have been thanked. Just as it would have been nice to have ever, even once, told Bonnie that she was welcome. That they’d loved her. That they always would.

Buzz heard Jessie breathing deeply next to him. She was maintaining such stoicism despite it all, the cramped cardboard box, the sudden dismissal by her kid, all these things that had hurt her so much in the past. 

But this was it - they were going to be thrifted.

It was the best outcome for their plans.

He took both of Jessie’s hands and faced her. “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

“Now?” Jessie’s eyes widened in surprise. “The lights are still on.”

“As soon as Bonnie turns the lights out and goes to sleep,” Buzz said. “We shouldn’t wait until we’re at the thrift store to get out on our own. Some collector might be there.” There was, somehow, always someone waiting to snatch Jessie in her valuable rarity up.

“You’re going through with that plan?” Dolly asked, eyebrow raised. “Really? You’re going to go be Lost Toys in the middle of the mountains?”

“Don’t you want to get another kid?” Buttercup asked. “What could possibly be out there that is better than even the _chance_ of getting played with again?”

Buzz glanced at them, but looked back to Jessie, squeezing her hands as he caught her eyes. “The sooner we go, the fewer things can go wrong,” he said. “But only if you’re ready. If you want to try again with another kid - whatever you decide, whatever happens, I will be there with you.”

Even if he had to come find her in the attic. Even if he had to kick out a taillight and slip inside a car trunk to follow her to a museum.

Any human could decide to do anything with them from here on out, but he’d made his decision - to be wherever Jessie was.

She heard the promise with a smile, sorrow over the people she’d lost before mixing with love as she took a deep breath, then another. _No more being abandoned,_ she thought. _This could be the last time._ “Yes,” she said, squeezing Buzz’s hands back. “I’m ready to go.”

“Gone for a life of vagabonds in the wilderness, your loyalty and wits your only defense against the slings and arrows of fate,” Pricklepants opined. “There is a certain romance to the tale.”

“See?” Buzz chuckled, looking from Jessie to the other toys. “Someone gets it.”

“How romantic is it to get torn up by a coyote?” Buttercup muttered.

“We’ll be fine,” Jessie insisted. She perked up a little. “I always wanted to see a real coyote.”

“And the Milky Way, and the lake in the mountains -” Buzz added, encouraging her, and himself.

Bullseye neighed his agreement, and quietly bounced over to headbutt Jessie quietly. Her anxiety was washing away. She was really going to do it - she was going to disappear into the wilds with Buzz and Bullseye, and never be given up, stored, lost, or separated from them again.

“We’ve had more than one kid already,” she went on. “We’ve got great memories to take with us. Emily, Andy, and Bonnie - they loved us, we loved them, and we’ll always have those memories, no matter what else happens.” She breathed in, out. “But it’s time for something else to happen.”

“Our mission was a success,” Buzz agreed. “If you meet another Space Ranger at the thrift store,” he added, to their friends, “try and let him know he’s a toy easy, will you?”

“I’m really not sure you’re doing the right thing,” Dolly said. “But if it’s what you’ve decided to do - well, then, take care of each other out there.”

“Ride into the sunset knowing your work here is done,” Pricklepants agreed.

“And if you do get eaten by a coyote, give it indigestion,” Buttercup added.

Buzz chuckled, and turned back to Jessie. She looked so relieved to know what came next. She looked so relieved that it meant braving the wilderness with him.

The moment of warmth he’d felt with Bonnie’s compliment flashed through him for a brief moment as Jessie leaned her head against his, her hand still gratefully wrapped in his. Maybe nothing again would ever match the intense wonder of being played with. But he’d given up once on the dream of having all the wonders of the universe to explore and protect - deciding his own fate with the wonders and perils of one whole world to explore with Jessie could come close.

Closer, absolutely, than doing it all on his own would.

They settled at the pinhole to wait for Bonnie to put her laptop away, shut off the lights and music, and leave them safe to disappear.

But hours passed, and Bonnie still typed away at her keyboard. Her typing diminished as the night wore on, but the clacking resumed each time they were sure she’d run out of words.

The lights stayed on. The playlist cycled through and began again.

Bonnie’s keyboard clacked so intermittently that she might not have been typing - she might have just been surfing the internet - or she might have been reading one of her own stories - but she never rolled over and turned the light off.

“Is she pulling an all nighter?” Dolly asked.

Buzz’s sense of dread was growing. He stuffed it down. This was still fine - if they took a ride to the thrift store, they’d still slip away there when an employee’s back was turned. _There wouldn’t be any uncertainty now if we’d stayed hidden in the closet,_ he thought. It wasn’t a Good Toy’s line of thought, but it wasn’t wrong.

“She knows she’s supposed to help Dad finish the deck,” Buzz said. “She’s _got_ to get some sleep before that.”

“She might be sleeping now,” Jessie said. “I can’t hear any typing.”

“Give me a boost,” Buzz whispered. Jessie laced her hands for him to step in, and he peeked just barely over the edge of the box, barely moving the seams of the flaps.

“She’s watching a movie!”

He was aghast. With a day of hard labor ahead of her, Bonnie was still propped up against her pillows, the clock beside her reading 4 AM, her eyes half-open with her headphones plugged into the laptop, though her music still played from her Bluetooth speaker.

“Watching a movie and listening to music?” Pricklepants repeated, skeptical.

“She likes to party,” Buttercup said.

“She could still fall asleep before dawn,” Jessie said, as Buzz dropped back to the ground.

He nodded, but said nothing. If Bonnie fell asleep, how would they know? If she never did, they would absolutely be seen as they left the box. Bonnie’s bed was right next to the only window that opened without squeaking. There was no chance they’d escape the house through any means but that window, unless they could make it to the closet to hide, but the closet doors were closed and squeaked so loudly that there was no chance of opening them. The lack of clutter in the room since Mom’s tidying frenzy left almost no reliable hiding spaces. _If only Bonnie hadn’t already gotten rid of her bedframe,_ he thought, but she had - and there was no hiding underneath a box spring directly on the floor.

 _The plan will still work,_ he thought. There probably wouldn’t be any collectors who knew Jessie’s worth who just happened to be at the thrift store on the particular day she arrived. They could still escape between now and Mom’s car. He just had to stay vigilant. No more letting chances slip by.

Morning changed the light in the room, visible through the pinhole. The stairs creaked as 7 am came and went, and Mom knocked on the bedroom door.

“Bonnie, don’t tell me you haven’t slept,” she scolded.

“Okay, I won’t tell you,” said Bonnie, yawning.

“You made a promise to Dad!”

“I know! I can still help!”

“Really? You’re not going to pass out in three hours, no matter how much coffee you drink?”

“I was on a roll. I think I figured out how to solve Queen Salinity’s dilemma.”

Pricklepants gasped with eager excitement, but Bonnie didn’t elaborate.

The box shook as Mom picked it up. The toys fell immobile positions, Buzz and Jessie face-down at the bottom. Buzz’s hand landed on Jessie’s back, the soft cotton of her yellow hair ribbon underneath his fingers. “Well you’d better get SOME sleep now. I’m going to the thrift store and Dad’s taking a load to the landfill, so you have a little bit of time to catch up.”

Bonnie yawned as Mom walked out the door, down the stairs. The latch creaked as Mom opened the front door, grabbing her keys. She wasn’t even going to set the box down -

“Wait!”

“Bonnie?” Dolly whispered, at the footsteps on down the stairs behind them. 

“Mom, are you going to the thrift store _right now?_ ”

“Yes, right now, I’m opening today!” Mom said, a little annoyed.

“Okay, but -” Bonnie groaned a little. “I guess . . . I wanna thank my toys after all.”

Mom sighed. “Hurry it up,” she said, plunking the box down on the front porch.

The flaps popped open. There she was again - not their last glimpse of Bonnie after all, her hair askew from a night of no sleep, her eyeliner smudged from a stray wipe with her hand. 

Love poured off her, warmer and gentler than sunshine

“I guess I like the plastic more than I said,” Bonnie said, reaching into the box and pulling out Dolly and Pricklepants. She let out a little chuckle over both of them. “Thanks for the lookspiration, Dolly. Thank you, Mr. Pricklepants.”

She hugged them both, and though they didn’t move, they felt as if they’d sighed. The tension was suddenly gone, swept away along with all the fear of a new journey. 

They had been of use to Bonnie. They had made her life better. She knew that. Her knowing it locked it into every fiber of their being.

They somehow looked more vibrant, more ready for a new child when she set them back in the box.

She thanked Buttercup and Bullseye, hugging their plush bodies together, and they shared the slightest, yet most elated smile as she dropped them, free with her love instead of without it. She picked Buzz up, pressing one of his voice buttons -

 _“Buzz Lightyear to the rescue!”_ Bonnie chanted along with the recording, laughing. “Thanks, Spaceman,” she said. “You got me to love the stars too fondly.”

If he could have cried, he would. The powerful magic of gratitude suddenly filled Buzz with so much wonder, he might as well have been spacewalking in the milky way. 

“Oh, so are you going to go to college for Astronomy after all?” Mom teased.

“Maybe,” said Bonnie. “I could write some cool books about space then.” 

_Bonnie loved the stars because of him._ Bonnie had something that wonderful to take with her, and he would always be a part of it, even free to live his own life.  


The means to choose his own fate was the gift Bonnie’s thanks gave him.

She placed Buzz back in the box, facedown, where his hand landed again on Jessie’s back, and her hair ribbon.

She hovered, looking over the last contents.

“Oh, Sheriff Jessie,” she said, reaching in.

There was tenderness in her voice. There was so much care there. 

She picked Jessie up with one hand, and reached in to grab Jessie’s hat as well. She lifted Jessie out. Her hair ribbon, caught in Buzz’s fingers, slipped off the end of her braid, stuck in his hand.

Bonnie turned Jessie over without noticing the missing bow.

“I really had a lot of good times with Sheriff Jessie,” she said.

“You want to keep her?”

“Mmm.”

Jessie’s features remained still as Bonnie looked her over. Facedown on the cardboard, without eyes on him, Buzz struggled to maintain his expression. 

He’d known this was a possibility. He had memorized the route back from the thrift store. I’ll be back for you in no time, he thought, wishing his thoughts could reach Jessie.  


How many times had he told her, wherever she went, he would be with her? Had he told her enough that she knew never to disbelieve him, even if she were trapped in storage?

“I have outgrown her,” Bonnie said. Buzz nearly sighed with relief. “But she’s unique, isn’t she?”

“Unique is . . . A word,” said Mom, leaning over Jessie with a slightly skeptical expression.

“I haven’t seen another doll like her,” Bonnie said. “She’s not a Barbie, and, I dunno, she’s just nicer than a doll you’d get at, like, Target or whatever. She’s kind of old.”

“Does she spark joy?”

“She does, but if I take her to San Francisco, she might get damaged, or dirty -”

“So put her in storage.”

Jessie did not move. _I’ll be back for you,_ Buzz thought. He should have told her so every day, instead of the few times he had.

“How’s she gonna spark my joy if I leave her in storage, Mom?”

“Well you’ll get joy knowing she’s there,” Mom said, “Waiting for when you have kids of your own to give her to.”

“I don’t even know if I want kids,” Bonnie said.

“Well, honey, if you don’t want kids and you don’t want to take her to San Francisco, do you really want her?”

Bonnie evaluated Jessie. She thought for a long time.

“I’d rather have her around if I do decide to have them,” she decided. “I can figure that out later, but I can’t un-donate her. I’ve never seen another doll like her. I’m not saying I WILL have kids,” she eyeballed her mom, “but if I do, I guess she’s the only one I’d care to set aside for them.”

“Find a good container to store her in. Something plastic, in case we get moths or raccoons.”

“My old nail polish box would work,” Bonnie said. She set Jessie on the porch railing. “I’ll go get it. Donate the rest,” she said, pausing in the doorway. “They did bring me a lot of joy. Some other kid will love them.”

Jessie’s braid unraveled slightly without its ribbon as Mom took the box of toys down the porch steps. Bonnie ran inside to get the nail polish box.

Her grin dropped as Mom stopped by the scrap heap of broken branches and rocks from the yard, bits of wood and broken cinderblocks and rebar from renovating the house and building the deck. Dad was pulling an empty black trash can between the heap and the truck.

“Still going to the dump?” Mom asked, box in hand as Dad leaned his shovel against the truck.

“Yeah, this is a two barrel load at least,” Dad said, looking over the heap.

Mom reached into the box of toys. “Don’t tell Bonnie,” she said. She pulled out -

 _Buzz._ Jessie lifted her head from the railing, already mid-panic.

“We have five of this same space toy just collecting dust on the shelves,” Mom said. “I feel bad not telling Bonnie, but -”

“Better drop him in before she gets back downstairs,” said Dad, zipping his lip.

Mom dropped Buzz in the trash barrel. “You’re the best.”

Jessie fell limp as Mom turned around, walking to her car with the box. Bonnie thundered downstairs, yelling “Found it!”

Dad picked up a shovel. He scooped up a full load of rocks, chunks of two-by-four, twisted, rusted rebar, and dropped it into the trash barrel.

It was impossible to tell if anything cracked inside, beyond the sound of the wood and metal crashing and clanging. Panic flooded Jessie and clashed against the urge to _be still_ as Bonnie picked her up, the instinct and horror so intense the whole world seemed to spin. Bonnie carried Jessie inside, holding her with her eyes facing out to the yard.  


Dad dropped a cinderblock on top of Buzz. He shoveled in another load of rocks and broken wood. And another.

__Bonnie whipped Jessie away from the sight, running upstairs. “It’s just the right size for you,” Bonnie said, happiness pouring off her as she stared Jessie in the eye, and the pressure of Bonnie’s direct gaze kept her from screaming._ _

__In her room, Bonnie set Jessie carefully on the floor by a red and white bandanna, and an old gift bag with tissue paper crunched up inside. She laid the crumpled tissue paper in the box, then laid the bandanna over the tissue paper. She arranged Jessie on the bed of tissue paper, put Jessie’s hat on her midsection, and crossed her hands over the hat’s brim. She folded the sides of the bandanna over Jessie, blinding her._ _

__Jessie’s smile dropped into an open mouthed breath of terror. Bonnie pressed the plastic lid down on top of her, shoving her deep into the tissue. The tiniest scream she could muster with Bonnie still this near leaked out of her constricted throat as Bonnie snapped the plastic stays of the storage container down._ _

__Jessie tried to press her hands against the lid, but the tissue paper and lid held her down so tight that there was barely space to move her hands side to side. She hyperventilated quietly, hearing Bonnie still so close, her claustrophobia warring with the baked-in need _not to move, not to scare her kid._ The walls pressed in around her. The tissue paper crinkled too loudly. The bandanna and the lid dimmed the light almost to nothing, but the box was being lifted, moving again, and then she was still, set down somewhere, the sound of cardboard box flaps warning her that total darkness was coming -_ _

__All the light vanished._ _

__“No, no, no no no.”_ _

__In the complete _being unseen_ of storage, Jessie’s voice broke out of her in a whisper._ _

__Footsteps walked - down the attic ladder._ _

__“No no _no -_ ”_ _

__The lid pressed the cloth bandanna against her face. There was no difference between closing her eyes and opening them._ _

__The attic door slammed shut. In the crash she heard again the heavy, crushing scrap dropped on Buzz, pulverizing him at the bottom of a trash barrel._ _

__She couldn’t see anything else against the backdrop of darkness but him falling, then the first crushing load, then the next._ _

__There was nothing else to think. There was nowhere to move._ _

__There was no one to hear Jessie scream._ _

__So she did._ _


	2. When Your Head's In the Clouds And You Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buzz survives being thrown out, but arrives at his destination damaged – too damaged to realize a shattered helmet is the least of his problems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title is from Randy’s Newman’s “Plastic Spaceman.”

Chapter 2  
When Your Head’s In the Clouds And You Fall

“Still going to the dump?”

Buzz’s default smile dropped as Mom paused without reaching the car.

“What’s she doing?” Buttercup whispered.

“Yeah,” came Dad’s voice. “This is a two barrel load at least.”

“Stay still,” Dolly warned.

Mom sounded slightly guilty. “Don’t tell Bonnie.”

The box rustled as she reached in. Buzz felt Mom’s hand close around him. He saw horror dawn in the slight shift of the other toys’ expressions before he was out of the box, pinned in place by Mom and Dad’s gaze.

“We have five of this same space toy just collecting dust on the shelves.”

Buzz barely held his silence, even with the weight of instinct pressing on him to _be silent._ The overwhelming urge not to object crushed him in place. How had Woody been able to defy this impulse, back when they’d needed to escape Sid’s house? How had Sid’s toys -?

“I feel bad not telling Bonnie, but -”

“Better drop him in before she gets back downstairs.”

Mom dropped Buzz in the trash barrel. “You’re the best.”

Neither of them looked at Buzz as he fell to the bottom of the barrel. He landed, leaped up free of their direct gaze, and looked up just in time to see the first shovel of rock and wood chunks crashing down.

He flattened against the corner of the barrel. The shovelful of debris pinned his left foot in place. He tugged at it, scraping the paint from his boot as he wrenched himself free, and looked up just in time to see -

A full cinderblock coming down. Buzz wrenched his foot free and rolled, landing just centimeters from being crushed. The cinderblock landed on its side.

The shadow of the next shovel load fell over Buzz. He ran for the cinderblock and tucked himself inside one of the cement squares, then froze as a piece of rebar slammed straight through his helmet, shattering the plastic behind his head and pinning him in place.

The next load of scrap crashed down atop the cinderblock’s frame, penning him but leaving him uncrushed. The rebar through his helmet shoved his head forward, his forehead scraping on the cinderblock with enough friction to scratch his paint. Buzz breathed hard as more scrap came down upon his tentative roof, then another shovelful, then another, darkening his cement shell. Each load jolted him between the cinderblock and the rebar, threatening to crush his head.

He was alive though. The scrap roof held the load. The cinderblock hole was uncomfortable to be curled in, but aside from his shattered helmet, he was alive, if scraped. 

The relief and freedom he’d felt when Bonnie thanked him was gone in the panic of being thrown out. Buzz assessed his likely path as Dad finished filling the barrel. The Lockwood dump was a straight shot up I80 to Verdi. He’d looked it up on the internet long ago. All he had to do was walk north from the landfill until he hit the interstate, then it was a straight shot west across Reno to get to the exit that lead to the Anderson house, where Jessie would be safely in the attic. Maybe Bonnie would put her in a nice big box that she could easily get out of, and she’d be waiting in the attic when he returned, no lasting harm done.

He was broken, and about to be weeks worth of walking away from Jessie, who was living her worst nightmare, but none of this was insurmountable.

Buzz repeated that to himself as he felt the barrel lifted into the back of the truck.

His head hurt worse than it ever had before. When the truck rumbled to life and began its bouncing journey down the long, rocky driveway to the main road to I80, the rebar shifted, slamming against Buzz’s battery pack, and somehow that was the impact that made him see stars.

 _Exit 3, Exit 3,_ he thought. It suddenly seemed so important to remember that, to run through the street names he’d Google Maps-ed while considering possible exit strategies in the months before. _Past the lavender farm, before I80 bends south -_

The ride smoothed out as the truck merged onto the interstate. A horn blare and a sudden swerve jammed the rebar against Buzz’s battery pack so hard he felt the plastic strain and he had to twist in the cinderblock to accommodate the pressure. If his screws stripped out of their sockets, his batteries would be unprotected from the elements, his wiring exposed - he might lose his voicebox function, or his laser might short out, depleting his playability. He closed his eyes against the strain of the reorientation, and suddenly the truck was stopped -

\- he didn’t remember the vehicle even slowing down. The roadtime had simply vanished. Distantly, he heard Dad’s muffled voice, too far away to discern words until -

“- is closed.” There was the click of the truck’s driver’s side door opening. “Yeah, I know, apparently it’s a bank holiday. Gonna have to go -”

The door closed and Dad’s voice vanished again. A second or two more passed and the truck started up again, bumping over uneven pavement and picking up speed once more, back on the interstate.

Buzz breathed a sigh of relief. The landfill was closed. But his relief at the closed landfill was short lived - if he were back at the Anderson house for one more night, he was still back at the Anderson house trapped at the bottom of a trash barrel, compressed into a tiny space with no means to escape.

No, this was still a means to hope. Anything could happen overnight. Coyotes, or wind, or a small rare earthquake could knock the barrel over. Those were all long shots but they were still possible. Buzz breathed through the panic, leaning to accommodate the pressure of the rebar -

The truck turned right again. They were at the exit already? How had he so poorly judged the length of time it took to drive from Verdi to Lockwood? The internet had said 30 minutes, but unless he’d blacked out, they’d only been driving ten -

The truck kept turning, the exit - was the exit circular? The barrel tipped and Buzz and the contents shifted, rebar crushing him harder into the corner of the cinderblock. He didn’t remember a circular exit on the map. Didn’t he? A bright light flashed in his mind over his memories of the map of Reno - the truck was suddenly leveled out again, driving perfectly straight with the noise of the wind a loud roar in the dark. Buzz closed his eyes and the bright flash jolted him against the rebar once more. More minutes passed - the exit, what was the exit number again? Any exit, 2 to 5 would work, but there was a best one - he and Dolly had debated it one weekend -

The truck and barrel shifted once more, slowing down. Buzz braced in the cinderblock for the tumble of being tossed out. The truckbed bounced as someone stepped up in it -

“Got it, 3 - 2 -”

The barrel went up, then over. Buzz braced inside the cinderblock.

The rebar slammed hard into his battery pack, then scraped up to slam against his neck, pushing his head forward so sharply that he felt his cowl tear. He lost his grip, shoved out of the cinderblock, rolled in midair -

****

Thrust out of hypersleep, Ranger Lightyear awoke already tumbling down a mountain.

The stench of rot and pollution was thick in the air. The space ranger landed hard on the ground and lay still, assessing himself for injuries, staring as enormous alien feet walked past his line of sight. Every instinct screamed at him to be still.

“One more. This one’s not as heavy.”

The giant aliens hefted an enormous waste receptacle, their focus away from him. The intrepid space ranger bolted while the giants eyes were averted.

Piles of enormous tree branches came down behind him, rocks and chunks of giant lumber sending thundering shockwaves through the ground, but he flattened behind a wall of refuse and caught his breath, glancing around to assess the giant aliens. The one in casual clothing issued a farewell nod to the other in blue working coveralls and hopped back into his transport vehicle

When he turned around a monster had him in its sights.

Drool trailed from the jowls of the massive black and tan beast. Its exposed teeth were as long as the space ranger’s forearm. That jaw would easily crush his armor, or at the very least compromise its space integrity. Buzz leaped into action, firing his laser into the beast’s eye. It yelped and twisted away from the searing pain of the laser, and by the time it had the space ranger in its sight again he was already running for another refuse heap. The beast chased him, vocalizing in short concussive bursts, and the ranger realized with horror as the beast outran him that - in addition to his shattered helmet assuring him his spacesuit’s intersteller integrity had been compromised - his jetpack was nonfunctional. No amount of triggering ignition produced even a spark to lift him to safety.

A terrible noise of crashing filled the air, and Buzz ran towards it. It was likely to be merely another threat, but perhaps it would target the alien loudbeast and overlook himl. He turned the corner around a tower of refuse and -

\- and faced down a massive earthmoving machine, the metal plow as tall as a Class Nova freighter bearing down on him fast and pushing a tidal wave of garbage primed to sweep him under.

He sprinted at it, leaping past the plow with only the slightest knick to his boot, into the shelter of a massive wooden pallet. The sharp intonations of the beast followed the roar of the planet scraper away as he crouched in the wooden slats, getting his breath and his bearings back.

When he was certain he’d not be overheard, he flipped open his communicator. “Buzz Lightyear to Star Command.”

Star Command didn’t answer. The thunder of the planetscraper intruded on his airspace again, and he waited for the noise pollution to pass by once more.

“Star Command,” he repeated, with more force, into his communicator. “Do you read me?”

No answer. His spacesuit was more compromised than he’d initially assessed. The communicator showed ample reception, but for Star Command not to respond it had to be a readout error. Even his air quality monitor was not detecting the multitude of pollutants he knew would be present in a landfill this vast. The air was breatheable, but who knew what contaminants he’d already inhaled? Would continue to inhale, whether he liked it or not - his helmet was irreparably shattered.

Buzz flipped the broken helmet back. The warped and shattered glass caught, half-open behind his head, but it no longer altered his vision. The earthmover passed by again, and Buzz steeled his nerves to go investigate.

The beast was nowhere to be seen. The earthmover pushed another load of refuse into a pit, from which a smell of smoke emerged. The smell had an unexpectedly violent effect on the space ranger’s constitution - panic gripped him and he ducked back into the pallet, breathing heavily against some impulse he couldn’t name.

“Get it together, Lightyear,” he scolded himself. He ran through one of the breathing exercises the Academy forced all impulsive young cadets to learn. He hadn’t seen the value of the calming and focusing techniques when he was young and felt too full of battle resolve too believe he’d ever be sensitive enough for a panic attack, but there was so much he’d learned about himself in his time as a Ranger that the Academy hadn’t taught him.

WIth his panic calmed, Buzz looked out from his shelter again. He couldn’t stay where he was. This shelter was temporary and tenuous - as soon as the earthmover got to this trash mountain, staying put would only get him burned. This was the time to put space between himself and threats, to reconvene and see what he could salvage to escape the planet with.

He ran through canyons of garbage, away from the sound of machinery. Periodically he flipped his communicator open, trying in vain to reach Star Command, finally accepting that either his gear was nonfunctional, or the reception bar was a terrible lie.

When the sound of machinery was well behind him and the mountains of garbage had given way to sloping hills, enough that he could see the actual mountains of brown landscape around the vast landfill, capped at the peaks with snow, he settled in a defensible position against a garbage heap to record a log.

“Mission Log: I’ve crash landed on a strange planet. My ship is nowhere to be seen. My suit is no longer spaceworthy.”

Panic threatened to take hold of him again, but he breathed through it once more. The Academy weeded out candidates who panicked at a little danger early on.

“There seems to be no sign of intelligent -”

He trailed off mid-sentence, catching sight of his free hand.

He wondered, _When did I pick that up?_

He clutched a yellow ribbon in his hand. The edges were too finished for it to be a piece of junkyard scrap. It was too clean to have come from one of the garbage heaps, still in a loose knot as if he’d pulled it off something.

 _Just a piece of trash_ , logic told him, but logic also pointed out those details. He looked more closely at the cotton -

_He was slotting a prison compartment into a dark cell. From the darkness the prisoner cried, “Buzz, we’re your friends -” and the knowledge that the sweet voiced claim was a lie filled him with indignant fury -_

The flash left the space ranger reeling, dizzy even as he sat against the heap, as if he’d suddenly leaped sideways into another life.

The ribbon did nothing but sit softly in his hand. The vision it had triggered had been so sharp and clear, but now it was fogged, only the indignation remaining.

He waited for another instance, but none came. The anger from the false memory faded.

He began tying the ribbon around his wrist before he even wondered why he’d decided to do it. The ribbon was not much of an asset when his greatest problem was his lack of ship and his compromised spacesuit, but it could be a clue as to how he ended up on this planet, when his ship was supposed to have been sailing through a star system utterly devoid of life, let alone any intelligent -

He spotted movement at the edge of an adjacent trash heap. Persons of normal size, grimy and dusty with the marks of the dump, were ambling around the heap in a group.

Buzz slipped around the edge of his trash heap, cautiously watching their movements. There were three of them, arranged in a more or less defensive triangle, each member looking around periodically as if being accosted was a possibility. Still, they weren’t tense enough to suggest that imminent attack was certain - just a possibility. That tracked, for the threats he’d already encountered.

He stepped into view, hands up to be nonthreatening. “Greetings! I come in -”

The locals adopted defensive positions, but relaxed immediately upon recognizing him. It wasn’t the pleased sort of relief he expected from being recognized, though.

“Oh great, it’s another Space Ranger,” the lead local, a female alien with a porous textured skin and a flowing purple gown said. Her gown was oddly reminiscent of the pages of a book made of cloth.

“Another?” Buzz asked. His spirits rose immediately. If other rangers had crashlanded here, they doubtless were already working on the issue of escape. His work could be as good as half done already. “I respectfully request you take me to them.”

The three locals all chuckled, a dark and hopeless sort of sound.

“Not a chance,” the lead female said. She shuffled along, dragging her ponderous dress behind her.

“They’re all in Emperor territory,” said another of the locals, a tall, one-armed man with wild brown hair, wearing a singlet of animal skin that had possibly, once upon a time, seen better care. His face had the gaunt raggedness of a life in the wilderness, but his expression was much more sympathetic than the purple-gowned headwoman. “Last time I got that close to the Blue Hole I had two arms.” He shrugged his shoulders, as if the implication of his amputation were not deeply horrific, as if it were simply another thing that happened in a day in the enormous landfill - which, perhaps for these poor locals, it was.

“Emperor territory?” The bones of a story formed immediately in his mind. The locals banded together defensively to protect each other against exploitation by a local slumlord. There must, then, be troops of some kind organized among these heaps, and scarce resources gathered in a stronghold by an unjust tyrant who reigned terror over the locals, for them to brush off a traumatic amputation with such carelessness. Buzz was moved to pity by the horror they had become accustomed to.

“You would be wise to turn back the moment you see a tire, or a car,” said the third local, a heavily battered cyborg with unlit red lightbulb orbs where an organic being would have eyes. The cyborg adjusted a pointy hat on his square head, embroidered with stained stars, and ran a hand down the many wires protruding from its chin in a long beardlike tangle. “The Emperor goes hardest on Space Rangers.”

This Emperor sounded familiar. Buzz’s heart raced. Was it possible he had fallen to this planet at the design of Zurg, who had set a snare for Space Rangers traveling through an “uninhabited” zone in the vulnerability of hypersleep? The Emperor would soon find that this was a miscalculation on his part. Zurg might have snared space rangers before, but he had never snared Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger until then. The Emperor had assured his own downfall, whether he knew it or not.

“The other Space Rangers,” he pressed, as the band tried to pass him. “Are they imprisoned by this Atyre and Akarr? Who are they, minions of Zurg?”

“Oh no,” growled the headwoman, rounding on him. “We’re not playing this game today. Nobody has time for your delusions, and everybody’s heard them before, _plastic spaceman.”_

“Just find a place to hide,” the animal-skin-wearing wild man said. “You can come with us if you haven’t found one already.”

“Can he now?” cut in the headwoman, sarcastically. “Oh can he, _Steve?”_

Their faith in his abilities had obviously been injured by the number of Space Rangers who’d fallen into Zurg’s trap before his arrival. Their compliance would be as hard to gain as their trust. “I assure you, whatever disappointments you’ve met with regarding my colleagues -” Buzz began.

“No! Not listening! We’ve got shelter to find _somewhere._ Savannah Steve, stop inviting crazies to travel with —”

“But he’s in such good condition,” Savannah Steve said, as the headwoman caught sight of something atop a trash heap and stopped talking. “And you’ve seen them fight, they’re not bad to have around -”

“They’re near,” the headwoman cut in. Buzz followed her gaze to a mirror flash, signaling from a trash heap, and one behind it. “They’re on an intercept path! Darnit, Wizbot, I knew we shouldn’t have gone north today!”

The wizard robot huffed in offense. “Their patrol patterns _logically -”_

“When have you known the Emperor’s troops to act with _logic?”_ the headwoman snapped. Her ponderous gown made her slow to move as she shuffled in a circle, leaning on the tall wooden staff she carried. “Enough talking! We’ve got to go!”

He needed more information before he intercepted fascist enforcers on a strange planet. He turned to follow the aliens. “It will be faster if we carry -”

“Don’t! You dare touch me!” The headwoman snapped. She smacked him with her staff, fast enough that Buzz was surprised by her combat prowess - he just managed to deflect the blow before it landed on his head. “I haven’t made it this long in this pit by letting _idiots_ drag me anywhere!”

“We’ll make time fine,” Savannah Steve reassured him. “Pinny is faster than she seems.”

“Pinny?” Buzz repeated.

“Short for Pinnacle Princess,” Wizbot supplied.

He gasped. “I apologize, your highness! Had I known you were royalty -”

“Yeah yeah I’m very important and special and to be protected and obeyed,” growled the princess. “There are SO many people you’ve got to convince of that before you get to me.”

Obviously years as a refugee on this trash planet had caused the princess to disband with courtesies. Buzz swallowed his criticism. He had no idea what horrors the princess could have met with, to harden her so, but he could guess in looking at Savannah Steve’s empty arm socket.

He stuck close to the band, scouting ahead for threats, ignoring the occasional snickers as the locals? Refugees? Observed his tactical movement choices. When he waited for the group to catch up to him, invariably his eyes would be drawn to the ribbon around his wrist.

He felt like he was about to remember something, every time his gaze fell on it. Not quite a sense of deja vu, but more a sense of reaching for a word and not being able to remember it. When seeking a word, though, one could usually recall the meaning, and he couldn’t recall anything that would influence him to keep something as functionless as a ribbon on his person -

“What are you looking at?” asked a voice over his shoulder.

Buzz whirled to find Savannah Steve inches from his shoulder. He was shocked that he’d grown distracted enough to be snuck up on.

“Nothing,” he said, because he had no answers, but Steve’s eyes fell on the ribbon.

“That’s unique,” he said, and glanced Buzz up and down again. “You’re not fresh out of the box, are you?” he asked. “You’ve got a lot of signs of wear -”

“I did _crash land_ here,” Buzz reminded him, stung by the reminder that his suit was so damaged. When he had the time and means to keep his uniform tidy, no one’s suit was ever more spotless.

“Yeah, some foreign paint flecks, scratches, and is that sharpie I’ve seen on the bottom of your boot?” Steve surprised him by grabbing his boot and looking at the sole.

“Hey!” Buzz objected to this invasion of his personal space, but Steve gasped.

“It is!” He looked up with surprise in his gaze. “You had an owner!”

“The only thing with ownership over me is Star Command, and my re-enlistment date is coming up.” Technically he was only owned for the next half cycle. Buzz wrenched his boot out of the wildman’s hands. “Is this some form of local soothsaying?”

“Guys! Guys, he’s had an owner!” Savannah Steve called.

“Shut up! We’re not out of hearing range yet!” Princess Pinny hissed.

“What was your house like?” Steve asked, a sort of hunger in his eyes. “I never had a house - I was donated in the box to a library, and it was pretty great, but I always wondered -”

“I haven’t been to the capital planet in cycles,” Buzz admitted. “My house is probably dusty.”

“I mean with your kid,” Steve pressed. “Bonnie.”

“You’re mistaken. I have no children.”

“Then why’s her name written on the bottom of your boot?”

Buzz finally looked at the bottom of his boot. There was the name - foreign, and yet, foreign in the same way the yellow ribbon was - an image that seemed to cast a shadow on his memory -

“Guys, there’s something in there aside from the usual space case programming,” Steve said, knocking on Buzz’s head while he was too distracted to fend off the motion ahead of time. “See? He’s got an accessory.”

“It’s not -” Buzz paused, as Savannah Steve pointed to the ribbon. “I don’t know what it is,” he admitted.

“But it means something, otherwise you wouldn’t have kept it,” Wizbot said, looking at the ribbon. “Curious indeed! Does a mystery, for once, unfold around our deluded new friend?”

“Now hold on just a second,” Buzz objected, to this second accusation of delusion. “I understand it can’t have been easy for you on this planet, but aspirations of leaving are not -”

“Don’t get mad,” Savannah Steve said. “If there’s something besides clouds in there, we’ll help you find it.”

 _“Love_ how helpful we suddenly are,” Princess Pinny snarked with another roll of her eyes as Steve slapped Buzz on the jetpack in a friendly side-hug.

The slap made him see stars.

It made him see their faces, all over again, Bonnie’s little round baby face as she’d grown out of her babiness through the years, her brown hair shifting to purple, the stories she’d woven for him and for Woody, Dolly and Buttercup and - and with her red hair, always tied in the braid that Bonnie had never undone, Jessie, _Jessie -_

_Who was trapped in the attic in the nightmare he’d promised to save her from._

Horror overcame Buzz. _“Jessie!”_


	3. Promises, Swear Them to the Sky

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter’s title is taken from The Naked and the Famous’ Young Blood. I have the Renholder Remix on my playlist for this story.
> 
> Trigger warning for discussions of suicide: This chapter is going to imply off-camera suicide of non-canon characters, and go into the scenes in Toy Story 1 where Buzz was strapped to a rocket at Sid’s and passively accepting his likely death. This whole story is going to reference that scene a few times. Some side characters will express suicidal ideations as things get darker (not Buzz or Jessie), but none will commit, so I just wanted to make sure anyone who has trouble with themes of suicidal ideation got a heads up ahead of time.

Chapter 3  
Promises, Swear Them to the Sky

Jessie had cried, and cried, and she could have gone on crying because there was nothing - not a single other thing to do in the absolute dark of the box.

Except try to escape again.

She shifted in her shroud, tissue crackling loudly in her ears. She slid her hands beside her face and pushed up - but putting pressure against the lid just pushed her deeper into the tissue.

No. "No," she hissed, through the scarf. "I'll find a way." She'd done it before. "Jessie finds a way. Jessie finds a way -"

There was no paperclip this time, no tape strip to bust through. She could still hear the click of the latches Bonnie had snapped down. It would take raw strength to bust out.

Jessie tucked her knees up underneath her hat, shoving it to the foot of the box. She knew she didn't need to breathe, but she felt so much like she did have to every time the scarf brushed her face. With her knees to her chest, she pushed against the lid again, pressing her booted feet alongside her hands. She pushed, her height finally giving her the force needed to press against the lid, her shoulders meeting the bottom of the container -

She strained and groaned, but the lid didn't budge. She remembered the way the light had darkened, not like flaps of cardboard were being closed, but like something was being dropped on top of he box - the clothes Bonnie wasn't taking to San Francisco? That would be so much extra weight atop the box, on top of the latches keeping her penned in.

Penned in. She was penned in.

Her breaths came faster. The bandanna pressed against her face. She felt hot, crushed, tangled like an animal in a net. The faint, sharp smell of nail polish made her head hurt, worse than all the crying had.

She stretched out again, trying desperately to recapture any sense of space around herself. There was none. The tissue and scarf always pressed on her, pushing her back against the lid. Jessie lost control for a moment, her anxiety leaving her mouth in a long, moaning scream.

She let herself have that thin steam valve of release. She was too tired from crying over Buzz to panic fully all over again.

Or was she? Thinking of Buzz, and the way he'd just died before her eyes, flooded her with sorrow all over again. They'd had a whole future planned out. They'd had a whole life to live together, and it had been so beautiful when it was a dream.

Now it was a nightmare, a mockery even that Jessie had dreamed it. There was no life waiting for her underneath the unfiltered stars, atop the mountains by the lake with her sweet space toy. She would never find out if the widest open spaces could fill the void in her heart that Emily, Andy, and Bonnie left, because who cared about standing in a wide open space if she didn't have Buzz's hand to hold in it?

Even the hope of a child of Bonnie's was too much to think of now. Bonnie would not be having children for years - if she had them at all.

What would Jessie become, after years in the dark of panicking and mourning, with nothing to distract her from her misery? Could a toy's heart break enough that a child could perceive it? Would it change her smile, or emanate from her in some strange, magical way that a child could be put off by? If it could, Jessie was certainly going to find out.

If she ever left the box again.

Even there in the dark, she felt the pressure not to make a sound. Not to be heard by Mom and Dad, now that they'd come home for the night. The attic was right above their bedroom and Jessie heard their voices, faint and indistinct through the layers she'd been packed in.

How could she still feel pressure not to expose herself to them, at this distance, in this dark, when they'd just unknowingly killed Buzz? How could she make them have to deal with the fact that they had? The Andersons were good people. Good parents. Good parents and good people had casually killed Buzz right in front of her eyes, without knowing they were killing anyone at all, and a good child who she loved had just sealed her away into the fate that she dreaded more than death.

Jessie began to cry all over again.

It changed nothing, of course. Time passed on, and on, and all crying did was make Jessie's head hurt more. She stared into the unchanging dark, only aware that it was night because Mom and Dad had stopped speaking, and turned off their evening music. The silence was as complete as the darkness.

She couldn't do this.

She couldn't spend years in the dark, with only her misery for company.

Even if it meant breaking rules. Even if it meant making people who hadn't meant to cause pain at all confront the fact that they had shattered her heart into a million irreparable pieces.

Jessie screamed for help.

She screamed, soft at first, her voice catching in her throat naturally as she defied her natural urge not to make herself known, but hours passed and she broke through the barrier - shouting like she'd never shouted before, like a person without the constraints of a toy's rules would howl for her freedom.

****

"Who's Jessie?"

Buzz spun, assessing his location. "I need to get out of here."

There was nothing but trash to his left, yard detritus and food waste, and a tall wall of corrugated metal, solid and without any handholds, to his right. The mountains past the wall were bare in the late evening light, brown without a trace of the green that began covering the mountains west of the lavender farm. Buzz climbed up a pile of garbage, sinking to his knees as he tried to gain height, looking for a clear line of sight over the landfill. "Where is here?"

Three toys stood at the bottom of the heap. The cloth princess whose body was the spine of a baby book, one-armed fashion doll wearing a wildman's leopard singlet, and wizard-shaped robot looked at him like he'd grown a second head. Buzz didn't remember meeting them. He didn't even remember getting out of the trash barrel. "Do we know each other?" he asked.

"I guess?" said the wildman doll.

"You're at the Carson City landfill," said the robot wizard. "Finest dump south of Reno."

"Securest too," added the princess book.

"South of Reno?" South of Reno but close enough for Dad to have driven there on a morning errand, when turned away from Lockwood - that was promising. It was long of a drive enough for him to have phoned Bonnie about it, though, and there were no landfills closer to Verdi. Buzz had only once widened the Google Maps view of Reno enough to tell what cities were beyond it. They'd been so small and across such stretches of desert that he hadn't even committed them to memory. Clearly that had been a mistake. "How far?"

"Do I look like a GPS?" the purple-skirted damsel demanded.

Buzz slid down the mountain of trash. "There's only one road going south out of Reno. If I can figure out which direction the interstate is I'll be back home in -"well. Definitely not no time.

"Home?" the bearded, LED-eyed toy repeated. "Ranger, you were thrown out. You don't have a home anymore."

Buzz waved his hand. "That's not important. I need a map."

"Oh, let me just check the shelves," said the princess, leaning back to look at the top of the trash tower. "Sorry sir, we seem to be out of stock."

"There's bound to be one somewhere. People throw out maps all the time," Buzz insisted.

"I don't think you understand what being thrown out means," said the robot wizard, a touch imperiously. "Even if you do find your way back to your home, it's best you understand now you won't be welcomed there -"

"I am aware of that," Buzz said, with a little more force than the situation warranted. _Bonnie thanked me,_ he remembered. _I taught her to love the stars. It was a good parting._ "My kid put Jessie in storage."

"You keep saying that name," said the leopard skin wearing doll.

"Then you'll find she is still welcome," Wizbot began to explain. "She won't be eager to leave a house where a child wants her -"

"Jessie's afraid of the dark," Buzz clarified, surveying the next trash heap. "She was in storage for years before we had the same kid and small spaces make her panic. I promised her I'd get her out if it ever happened."

The princess snorted. "You made a promise to someone?"

"Oh," said the wizard bot, pitying again. "He must not know after all."

Buzz looked over his shoulder at the toy. "Know what?"

"That you're but a mere toy," Wizbot said, condescending in his pity, "insignificant in a world built without the slightest consideration for your goals, your desires, or any relationships you were idealistic enough to forge in your pale shadow of a life."

Buzz stared at him.

"Yeah, I got that," he said. "There's no need to make it depressing."

The princess book and the wizard looked at him with increasing expressions of skeptical bewilderment, but the wildman's glee burst out of him in a squeal. "Guys! Don't you see what's going on here? He's crossed the first threshold. He's left the limits of his known world, and been thrust into the unknown, where meaning is made up and the rules don't matter! He's on a Hero's Journey!"

"Ah yes, the classic Campbellian narrative structure," agreed the Wizard Robot. "But we could hardly qualify as threshold guardians. Any aid we have to provide is decidedly not supernatural."

"Hey, nerd squad? Put a pin in it," the princess book said, holding her hand out to silence the wildman. She leaned on her chopstick staff, cocking her head at Buzz as if he were a puzzle missing a piece. "I'm still stuck on a Space Ranger that knows what he is and isn't crying about it."

Buzz looked from one toy's face to another. He didn't know these toys, but they didn't seem to need introductions the way he did.

It occurred to him again that the shadows were evening-long, but he couldn't account for the hours that had clearly passed between then and the early morning when he'd been thrown away.

"I don't remember how I got here," he admitted. He remembered being dumped out of the truck, but nothing after that, and certainly not meeting other thrown out toys. "Have we spoken before -?"

"We've spoken to a space ranger who didn't know he was a toy, but not to you," Savannah Steve said.

"Curious indeed!" said the wizard robot. "It seems our friend has multiple personalities. What a strange occurrence. Is it not enough of a mystery that we all lack the basic neurology for the speech that we somehow possess anyway? Now we must ponder how a solid plastic vessel can contain not simply one, but multiple people!"

"Yeah, Professor, we're all questioning the meanings of our lives constantly," said the princess, brushing him off. "So, you're only a space case some of the time? That's better than the whole time. Is that how you're still around? Keep switching back to Space Ranger mode every time the knowledge becomes too much?"

Buzz stared at her, frowning. His head throbbed dully, hurting longer than he could remember any injury troubling him before. "Multiple - No, I don't have multiple personalities. I learned I was a toy long ago."

"Then what was with the 'Respectfully Request' and 'captives of Zurg' nonsense a moment ago?" the princess book asked.

"I don't remember anything between now and when Dad emptied my trash barrel."

"And this hasn't happened to you before?"

"No, n -"

Buzz cut himself off as he remembered that it had.

Not that he remembered it happening. But his friends had told him enough of how he'd behaved at Sunnyside, after Lotso and his goons had . . . done whatever they'd done to make him lose himself.

The blur of memory that was Sunnyside, deeply unpleasant even to look at indirectly, was a shameful and upsetting specter. Buzz covered his aching forehead with his hand, staring at the dirt.

"It . . . hasn't happened more than once," he corrected himself.

And come to think of it . . . none of the toys had ever told him how it happened.

Come to think of it, he'd avoided asking.

"Well, at least we don't have to be the ones to tell you," the Princess said. "That's a relief."

"I wasn't looking forward to watching you figure it out on your own," Savannah Steve said. "But you seem so well-adjusted, for a Buzz. Good for you!"

The wildman clearly meant it to be encouraging, but it just bewildered Buzz more. "What do you mean?"

"What do you mean 'what does he mean?'" the princess asked. "You're a Buzz Lightyear that knows he's a toy and hasn't jumped out a window. You tell us what makes you so special."

For a moment Buzz was blankminded, but not for long. HE dialed his memory back to the moment he'd learned the truth of his existence - and immediately jumped down a flight of stairs. Then allowed himself to be strapped to a rocket, and waited passively to be blown up, giving up hour after hour of time in which he could have escaped -

"The one in my library walked into traffic when we got it through to him," added Steve, sounding sad. "When a replacement got donated, we all agreed not to tell him."

The breath Buzz didn't need to take caught in his throat.

He was silent, overlooking the landfill, thinking suddenly of the whole aisle of Buzzes in Al's Toy Barn, each one learning, in a different circumstance, the truth.

The truth that, when he'd learned it, had driven him to test it by jumping down a flight of stairs.

The truth that devastated him so much, he'd have stayed strapped to a rocket until he was dead - if Woody hadn't been there to talk him into living.

He hadn't thought about the life he'd once believed he had, not in detail, for years. There wasn't a point in thinking about it, once Woody convinced him that this life could be worth living, once Woody had turned out to be so correct. He'd enjoyed so much being there for Andy, contributing to his vivid playtime. He'd felt such purpose helping Woody keep order in Andy's room. He'd had a whole second lifetime of the excitement and wonder of Bonnie's imagination. He'd found Jessie.

All this because when he'd lost the life all the Buzzes believed they had - he'd just happened to lose it with a toy wise enough to convince him that his existence was worth sticking around for.

There were whole aisles of Buzzes. There weren't a lot of Woodys to go with them. And Woody was the only reason he had a life to fight to get back to now, instead of having ended up in a landfill like this twenty years ago, in far more pieces.

The horror of it left him silent, staring around the landfill.

Savannah Steve, gently waving, caught his gaze. "Does it have something to do with Jessie?" he asked, pointing to the yellow ribbon.

Buzz looked at the ribbon, thought of the moment it had caught in his fingers, grazing through Jessie's yarn as Bonnie pulled her away from his hand. The moment, if he were honest with himself, that he'd caught onto it, understanding too fast what was coming, just by the way Bonnie so lovingly picked Jessie up.

He thought about getting into the details, into telling the toys how lucky he was only just realizing he was, that of all the toys that could have been there the moment he confronted the truth, it had been Woody. That of all the kids he could have been owned by first, it had been Andy. That Andy's quality, and Woody's determination not to let him allow himself to be killed, had let him live long enough to meet Jessie, who made him feel like he had the heart he knew logically he didn't.

"Yeah," he said, instead. There was too much to get into there. Too much of how he missed Woody, too much of how, even with Bonnie, he'd missed Andy, and he always would miss him, just like he'd always miss Bonnie now. There was no possibility he'd see the kids again - and barely a possibility he'd see Woody at all - but he knew where Jessie was, and where she'd still be if he lived long enough to get back to her. "It has everything to do with her."

"Her!" Steve shouted, exultant again. "Your maiden fair!"

"She's a cowgirl," Buzz corrected.

"Is she your true love?"

Oh, that was easy, if a bit personal. "Well, yes. Yes she is."

Steve stifled a squeal, and Book Princess hissed at him. "You're gonna bring the troops down on us!"

"Whose troops?" Buzz echoed.

"Oh great, we get to have THAT conversation again too," snarked the princess.

"You said she's in storage," Wizbot remembered. "Storage where?"

"Verdi."

Steve and the princess looked at the wizard, who cleared his throat.

"Verdi is very nearly 50 miles from here," supplied the wizard, imperious again. "Across a bare desert, and with the whole city of Reno between it and us."

"How many miles have you walked on those little legs before?" asked the book princess, in the flattest tone imaginable. "You know you can't actually fly, right?"

Only Steve looked more excited. "Pinny, how are you not freaking out? He's on a quest to rescue a fair maiden trapped in a tower!" he exclaimed. "He even bears his lady's favor!"

"Just like in your story," Wizbot added.

"Look, look," Steve waved Buzz over, reaching out for Pinny's stained and tattered dress. "Can I show him?"

Pinny rolled her eyes, but Steve already had a grip on her dress. She sighed. "Fine," she said, allowing Steve to spin her around and pull aside the first cloth leaf of her book.

"The Pinnacle Princess," read Savannah Steve, in a remarkably good Storytime voice, "In her Pinnacle Palace, drinks her tea from a glittering chalice -"

The short rhyming story told tale of a sweet and faithful princess, who waited alone at the top of a lofty tower on a lofty mountain for her dutiful knight Sir Sassafras to rescue her from solitude, while somehow having a staff in that solitude to keep her pantry full of tasty tea and crumbly carrot cake. Buzz felt uncomfortable as Savannah Steve enthusiastically dove in to Sir Sassafrass's many sterling qualities, his perfect ethics and his peerless logic, just as Pinny appeared uncomfortable at the parts of her own story describing how the princess's refusal to even try to leave the tower was somehow the morally correct choice, for which she was rewarded with rescue.

Buzz wasn't a knight, and Jessie likely had no faith he'd come for her, because Jessie likely thought he was destroyed. Meanwhile, the story insisted over and over again that it was somehow the Pinnacle Princess's duty to stay in one place and be rescued. Bonnie would have had loudly dictated and written a strong letter to the publisher encouraging them to, in the future, publish authors who had read at least a little feminist theory.

"That's a little reductive," Buzz said. It seemed to him that there were plenty of ways for a person, even a fancy one like a princess, to get out of a tower and down a mountain. A little thing like height wouldn't stop Jessie from making her own way out into the world, if she could get out at all. "Jessie's brave and resourceful. She might get herself free by the time I get back. She's gotten herself out of being boxed up before."

"What a peach," Princess Pinny said. "That'll make it easy for you to talk yourself out of feeling bad when you break your promise to her."

Outrage washed through Buzz. "I'm not going to break my promise."

"No?" Pinny said, fixing him with her embroidered blue gaze. "You're not going to realize that the only way out of this dump is through the front gate, guarded by a dog that only ever sleeps when people are walking around keeping watch, or over an unclimable wall, and then over miles and miles of windswept, coyote-infested desert? You're gonna just get lucky and waltz your way out of here, NOT get picked up and sent back all over again by a highway cleanup crew? You're going to get through all of that for someone so brave and resourceful that she probably doesn't need your help? Why bother, if she doesn't need you?"

Buzz stared at the cynical doll in surprise. There was being jaded, and then there was . . . this. "I love her."

It was an oddly personal thing for him to have to just say to a stranger, but Pinny wasn't impressed.

"So?"

So? "I don't know how to explain to you that that means I'll do anything to get back to her."

"Tell us about your solemn vow," Savannah Steve begged, bouncing in place beside Buzz in his excitement to wring every bit of emotion from the tale. "What did you swear to your maiden fair?"

"That . . . wherever she went, I'd follow," Buzz said, uncomfortable and bewildered as Savannah Steve lifted a hand to his forehead and - yes - swooned with emotion.

"Oh, you made a PROMISE promise?" Pinny said. She laughed, a deeply unamused sound, and resumed her slow crawl through the landfill. "I thought it wasn't possible, but you're dumber than you look."

Pinny was obviously the leader of this small room - if three toys could be called a room, when they also didn't have four walls and a roof - but Buzz was finding his temper harder to contain the longer she spoke so disrespectfully. "Excuse me!"

"Your cowgirl's gonna be waiting in that attic a long time," Pinny went on. "50 miles of desert long. If her kid wants her there, she's not going to care if you come for her or not. And if her kid doesn't care about her -" her voice cracked a little - "then she's probably still smarter than you are, and knows that toys that make promises to each other are just liars in the long term."

"Broken promises are as common as broken toys around here," Wizbot agreed. "It was naive of you to make a commitment to someone, knowing what you are."

"It was idealistic," said Steve, softly.

"All the Buzzes are idealistic," Pinny snarked. "Until suddenly they're not anymore."

There it was again, the shadow of how close he'd come to missing out on this life that he was now willing to walk across an entire desert to preserve. Buzz fell silent at the specter of how much he'd almost missed out on, simply by not knowing that one day he'd have it.

"The last time she saw me," he finally said, "she must have thought I died. Whether she's trapped in storage or not, she's also mourning me. I can't let her go through that when there's even a possibility I could get back to her."

"This isn't too wonderful to be true," Savannah Steve piped up, encouraged by Buzz's determination. "Good sir," he went on, picking up enthusiasm all over again, running to the front of the band and gesturing dramatically with his one hand so Pinny and Wizbot could also see, "You who bear your lady's favor on this perilous quest, you have the heart of a True Knight!"

"I don't have a heart, and I'm not a knight," Buzz corrected. The Pinnacle Princess's knight had been a bastion of perfect perception who never once mistreated any one of his friends. The other toys hadn't told him much about what he'd missed at Sunnyside, but they'd told him enough that he knew he couldn't say that. "I'm not even a Space Ranger," he pointed out.

"Regardless," Savannah Steve insisted. He lunged to a dramatic kneel. "I shall do all that is in my power to help you succeed in your quest!"

"Oh great, now my guys are making promises," Pinny sighed. "I didn't realize it was contagious."

Buzz looked at the mountains of refuse they passed. This portion of the landfill was mostly for organic trash, food waste and cleared brush. Nothing useful for a toy on a quest that, to his scale, truly could only be described as epic.

"If I'm going to have a chance at success," Buzz said, "I _am_ going to need some supplies."


	4. As You Shiver, Count Up All Your Mistakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This chapter’s title is, like the last, from Young Blood – Renholder Remix by The Naked And The Famous.

Chapter 4

As You Shiver, Count Up All Your Mistakes

As the sun went down, Carson City glowed in the west, over the ridge outside the metal wall around the landfill. The glow blotted out any sign of Reno that Buzz might have seen to the north. He wished again he’d ever thought to study a map of the cities farther from Verdi, and where they were in relation to the interstate.

Household trash was more plentiful to the east, closer to the landfill entrance. The food waste and yard detritus of the organic waste mountains was safer during the day, since it was allowed to rot naturally and didn’t have Emperor troops combing it for supplies, but there was no usable refuse there for a toy with a quest before him.

The band of four picked along the border between the organic trash and piles of black trash bags. The promise of twist ties, paper clips, maybe a glass shard or scrap of tape, made the risk of being plowed worth it, but Pinny would still not let her guys go too far beyond the border. They approached each unbroken black trashbag in formation, Wizbot, Steve, and Buzz pulling the plastic tight for Pinny to stab open with her chopstick. The princess book kept watch with Wizbot while while Buzz and Savannah Steve sorted through the garbage in the dimming light of sunset.

The silence bore down on Buzz, broken only by the sounds of the garbage they rooted through. “So -” he said, addressing Steve. “You were in a library?”

“Yeah, the kids’ section had a community toy box,” Steve said, tossing a wad of soaked paper towels over his shoulder and pushing an apple core aside. “Lot of hand-me-downs. I loved hearing the other toys’ stories about their homelives,” he said. 

There was an awkward moment of silence as Steve eyed Buzz with a sort of hunger.

“You - uh - you want to hear about my home?” Buzz realized.

Savannah Steve nodded eagerly. “You had a real wrote-her-name-on-you owner!”

“Two, actually,” Buzz corrected.

Steve’s jaw dropped. He gushed with envy. “ A two-kid toy! How long did they have you?”

“Around ten years with Andy, maybe . . . 14 with Bonnie,” Buzz said. “Of course a lot of those years were in a toybox or a closet -”

“That sounds like a fairy tale,” Savannah Steve said, wistful.

“I’m not the longest owned toy I know,” Buzz said. “Jessie’s been around since the 50’s - she had three kids.”

“Wow!” Steve was starry eyed at this fantasy brought to life. “I can’t even imagine. Even Wizbot was only at UNR for a decade -”

“UNR?” Buzz repeated.

“Yeah, University of Nevada, Reno. Taped to the ceiling of a dorm room. That’s why he’s so educated. The kids would yell about their homework at him when they were stuck, so he’s learned philosophy, ethics, trigonometry, logic and rhetoric, women’s studies, interpretive dance -”

None of the subjects Steve listed included being played with. Buzz was surprised Wizbot wasn’t the most bitter of their crew. “And Pinny?”

Steve looked to where Pinny stood watch, the wind ruffling her yellow yarn hair. “Divorced dad bought her out of a casino gift shop at the end of a personal trip,” he said, his voice quiet. “The kid was already way too old for her, but Dad didn’t know -”

Buzz cast an understanding glance at the princess book, brooding in all her cynicism. “Was she played with even once?”

“Nah,” Steve shook his head. “Tossed aside in the kid’s room. She got shoved under the bed for seven years before she ended up in the trash bag. She’s been here longer than Wizbot and me combined. We’d have gotten incinerated, torn apart by the dog, or caught by the Emperor long ago without her.”

No wonder the princess had no use for her courtesies. And no wonder Steve and Wizbot followed her so faithfully.

Buzz started to ask about the Emperor situation, but Steve had already launched on. “Anyway, it’s been ages since a toy with a story as compelling as yours turned up here,” he said. “A truehearted quest in the name of love, to rescue a trapped maiden -”

“I told you, she might get out on her own,” Buzz objected. “You don’t know how resourceful she is.” Admiration leaked into his voice. 

“But if she can’t get herself out, that’s not because she’s not strong and resourceful and brave and everything you say,” Savannah Steve insisted. “No one’s strong enough to do everything. Isn’t it wonderful that we don’t have to be? Because we have each other?” He glanced at Pinny and Wizbot, and shrugged his shoulders at them. “I know it comforts me.”

Buzz had only just finished thinking of how different his life was because of all the help and support he’d lucked his way into accidentally having. “It is comforting,” he agreed.

“If you act assuming she can’t get out, and she already has,” Steve said, “She’ll still be so relieved when she sees you again and knows that you were always coming for her.” He smiled - not as wistful as when he’d wondered about having a home life to miss, but still wistful. “I’d have read a book about your noble quest twenty times in the library! Too bad we’ll never be published, huh?”

He would not let this knight thing go. “Just -” Buzz pulled aside the shell of a broken radio, popping open the battery compartment and finding nothing - but underneath it was gold, in the form of a plastic-coated wire twist-tie. Buzz wrapped the wire around his waist like a belt. “Keep an eye out for magnets, will you?” he said, eyeing the metal fence around the landfill.

Pinny’s dark laughter met that request.

“Magnets are top on the list of contraband,” she said. “You’re going to have to get in the Emperor’s fortress if you want to find one of those. And if you do find one, and the Emperor finds it on you, you can say goodbye to your limbs real fast.”

“I found something!” Wizbot called. “A tube of -” the toy tilted his head to read the half-stripped label on the inch-long tube. “Kragle!”

The tube looked crushed and spent. “Is there any left?” Buzz asked

“A little, under the glue plug.”

“That’s valuable,” said Buzz, eager for the tube. Anything could happen on a Quest and some kragle would absolutely be better to have than not have.

“That’s more contraband if the Emperor catches you with it,” Pinny said, but she didn’t object to the keeping of it. Buzz wondered if he imagined her and Wizbot glancing quickly at Savannah Steve’s empty arm socket.

“It's yours, if you feel safe holding onto it,” Buzz said to Wizbot. “You found it. It might help if Steve finds his arm again.”

Savannah Steve and Wizbot looked pained. “I’d rather we not hold onto it,” Steve said, reaching for the arm he didn’t have. “If I find my arm again I’ll be in the Emperor’s clutches, and he won’t let me keep the glue or the other one.”

“Who is this Emperor, anyway?” Buzz asked, though he had an idea. A Zurg lording over the only empire available to him in his delusion. Or maybe the Zurg was even lucid, and acting out the closest he could come to the power the Buzz Lightyear Saturday Morning Cartoon lore had promised him.

“His territory starts at the Dead Animals sign,” Wizbot said. “Any action figure intact enough to serve and bored enough to throw other toys into his arena get work from him.”  
“Space Rangers end up in the arena pretty fast,” Savannah Steve warned.

“They end in the arena pretty fast,” Pinny added, still keeping her careful watch.

“For all the toys who aren’t into gladitorial combat, he has leverage,” Wizbot went on. “Any kragle, sewing supplies, clean stuffing, batteries with a little power left - his troops comb the landfill for them every night. If you want to live in the safe zone of the tire pile, you’re required to surrender your supplies at the outer ring. The tire pile and the caryard are the only parts of the landfill where you won’t get plowed into the incinerator if you stay there all day.”

“Why aren’t you there?” Buzz asked.

“Because Tire Pile residency doesn’t assure anyone who looks like good blood sport that they won’t end up in the Blue Hole,” Pinny said. She pointed her staff at Wizbot. “Signal from the south. We better go find a night shelter back in the yard clippings.”

She shuffled down from her vantage point atop a broken TV and gestured to Steve to follow her.

Wizbot held the glue tube out to Buzz. “Better in the hands of one who still clings to hope of using it than in ours,” he said.

Buzz took the kragle, and twisted it into the wire around his waist. “I’ll keep it, but it’s yours,” he promised. “If you find Steve a replacement arm.”

Savannah Steve’s eyes shone. “Your largesse is most appreciated.”

“My what?”

“Your generosity,” Wizbot supplied, as they followed Pinny back to the organic trash. “Our friend refers to one of the six themes of chivalry: Loyalty, Forbearance, Hardihood, Largesse, the Davidic Ethic, and Honor.”

“So far you’re two for six,” Steve supplied. “Between loyalty to your maiden in her tower, largesse to yours truly -”

“I would argue three,” Wizbot said. “By surviving a trip in a trash can full of building scrap all the way from Verdi, sustaining great injury and still being on the move and thinking of others, he’s demonstrating his Hardihood - toughness, in the casual vernacular.”

“All you have to do now is show forbearance - that’s patience and restraint - and the Davidic Ethic. Then you’ll have the main five, which means you automatically have honor,” Steve said.

“What’s the -” Buzz asked, but couldn’t finish his sentence before Steve supplied, “the Davidic Ethic? That’s the willingness to overthrow tyrants. Just throw a rock at the Emperor and you’ve got that one!”

“Don’t go labeling him a hero when you haven’t known him long enough to see how fast his promises break,” Pinny called back, almost wearily.

“But Pinny, he’s three for six!” the wildman insisted. “Having three means he’s already like . . . More than halfway to having 4, with honor! He’s like a 3.75 for 6!”

“3.6 for 6,” Wizbot corrected.

“I’m just saying, no matter how many books you read at the library, life isn’t a story.” Mostly to herself, she added, “You’d think if he’d listen to that from anyone, it would be the literal book -”

“She’s right,” Buzz said, to Steve. “Life is much more complicated than a story. I’m not a hero, I’m just . . .” He fumbled with how to phrase it. “On a mission.”

“Mission, quest, potatohead po-tah-to-head,” Steve said.

“I’m serious,” Buzz cut in. He had to take another deep breath at the memory of the Potatoheads, and their last trip to Sunnyside together when Bonnie was ten. At least if they were in a box, they were in it together. “A hero wouldn’t have -”

Wouldn’t have - wouldn’t have what?

He was digging, suddenly, for a memory that was just out of reach, something that - was it his own memory, or had he simply been told it by the other toys?

“Buzz?” Steve jostled his shoulder. “You’re spacing out on us again -”

_The jostling filled his mind with a flash of - of Jessie in a cage and his hands were the hands pushing her cage into a cubbyhole, penning her into a small and dark space. She looked so scared and so hurt and desperate as he did it, as she cried “Buzz! We’re your friends -”_

Buzz dropped to the ground, hands at his temples, feeling short of the breath he didn’t need.

“You look as though you’ve been in orbit,” Wizbot said, kneeling beside him as Buzz stared at the twisted Snickers wrapper in front of him.

“I - ” any sort of explanation died in his mouth. Was this what being sick felt like? He didn’t want to announce, even to a toy who needed to stop putting him on a pedestal, that _he had put Jessie in a small, dark box and left her there himself, and been so angry at her for mocking him with a claim of friendship._

No, he was absolutely no knight in shining armor. It seemed all that was needed to make him _not even a good Space Ranger_ was to strip him of the context of his own life.

“Buzz?” Steve cut in, kneeling next to him, opposite Wizbot. “Are you still with us?”

“I’m not waiting for the ranger!” Pinny yelled, from farther along.

Buzz stood up. “I . . . flashed back,” he realized, “to the last time I was . . . “ He gestured to the sky. “In orbit.”

“Did you get a flashback of how you got there?” Wizbot asked.

Buzz trudged after the Pinnacle Princess. Reaching for the memory now was like trying to remember a missing word, without even the definition to go by. “No,” he said. He tried to remember that night, the flawlessly executed plan to get out of the Caterpillar room,, following Ken to the vending machine, being caught, the - well, there’d been shouting and the light had been so bright -

It was like the light shining on that memory was too bright for him to look directly at. Buzz sighed, fingers pressed against the bridge of his nose against a dull ache that would not seem to go away.

“Keep the faith, buddy.” Savannah Steve put his hand on the rim of Buzz’s spacesuit, where his helmet would never neatly close again. “There’s time to figure it out.” He shook Buzz gently.

Buzz’s eyes went too wide as something - _slipped._

****

The space ranger came to from hypersleep with an alien hand on his suit. He reacted with the combat training that hours of drilling had instilled in him as automatic. He grabbed the alien hand and flipped one potential hostile into another other, escaping triangulation and training his laser’s sight on the aliens.

“Halt! Identify yourself! What have you done with my ship?”

“What are you DOING?”

A female alien, angry and ponderously overdressed in a purple gown, slipped between him and the aliens with surprising speed, her staff ready to defend. “He just shook you, you lunatic, you didn’t need to throw him!”

Ranger Lightyear felt a pang of regret as he observed the one-armed animal-skin wearing man fumbling to help the aged droid to its ambulatory appendages. Still, the agents of Zurg were not above taking nonthreatening forms to gain sympathy. He kept his laser ready. “Are you the leader of this band?”

“Oh great, Steve, you broke him again,” the headwoman scolded.

“I didn’t mean to!”

“Yes, she is the leader of this band!” the droid cut in, leaping in front of the man and woman. He turned to them, muttering - “The actor took Improv in ‘98. Go with the power of ‘Yes, and -’” To Buzz, he addressed, “Yes, and our band needs your help, Space Ranger.”

Ah, that was likely. “I seem to have crash landed,” Buzz said, taking his laser off the group, glad he had set it to ‘stun’ before going into hypersleep. “I apologize for escalating the situation, but you caught me in hypersleep. I thought you were agents of the Emperor.”

“Yes, and . . .” Said the wildman, looking wide-eyed and panicked. “They’re . . . coming this way?”

Buzz frowned. “Are you . . . asking me if they are?”

The wildman said “Yes and -”

“NO,” cut in the headwoman, “But they were that way last we saw them.” She pointed behind Buzz. “C’mon, guys, let’s go some other direction.”

“I’ll dispatch the troops immediately.” The ranger turned to seek out the agents of Zurg.

“Pinny, no! What about his quest? His lady in the tower?”

“It’s not breaking his promise if he’s not the person who made the promise anymore,” Pinny growled. “He’ll get us killed showboating like they do -”

“Ranger! Look at your wrist!” Buzz looked over his shoulder at this bewildering exchange. “What’s that yellow ribbon from?” Steve shouted.

“What are you talking about?”

He glanced at his wrist - at the yellow ribbon that he didn’t remember tying there.

This went further than the mystery of where his ship was. Something about the ribbon itched at his memory, a sense of deja vu too intense to dismiss.

He held his wrist up to the wildman. “Why is this important?”

“Your true love is waiting for you!” the wildman shouted, while the headwoman rolled her eyes all the way to the stars that Buzz had fallen out of. “She’s trapped in her worst nightmare!”

“My true -” Buzz narrowed his eyes in skeptical bewilderment. He didn’t have a true love - he wouldn’t have minded having one, but he decidedly did not have even the time for one. “Is your friend all right?” he asked the droid, pointing to the delusional man.

“Y -” the robot started to say. “No,” he amended, “but you should consider joining us until you figure out the mystery of that ribbon.”

“Wizbot!” the headwoman snapped.

“Pinny, please,” Steve begged. “This is the only story we’ve ever heard in here that has the _possibility_ of a happy ending.”

The man looked so desperate. The headwoman softened so much, and so suddenly. Some drama between the group was playing out - and they thought he was part of it. Well, space rangers were living legends in the universe they protected. Of course his presence could signal the first happy ending that these battered refugees could have seen.  
“If you need protection from the Emperor’s troops I’ll stay with you in your defense,” he decided. “How long has Zurg had this planet in thrall?”

“I can’t believe you won’t just let him not be our problem anymore,” Pinny muttered.

“I’m afraid that Zurg will never cease making himself everyone’s problem of his own free will,” Buzz informed the purple gowned headwoman as he joined their band.

“Just - just look for a place to shelter, will you?” the woman groaned. “And . . . some magnets, I guess. If you can find them.”

****

They sheltered until the dawn underneath a battered blue tarp that reeked of rotten food. Dawn broke over the bare mountains in, the droid informed Buzz, this planet’s east. Daylight did nothing to improve the destroyed landscape’s appearance - towers of broken machinery and rotting organic waste littered the ground for miles around, encircled by staggeringly tall mountains as bare and brown as a crater-blasted moon.

“I’ve never seen a planet Zurg has ravaged worse than this,” said Buzz, when he emerged from the shelter to observe the landscape. The headwoman behind him just groaned in agreement.

A distant rumble of machinery reached his ears. He scrambled up a branch cut from a gargantuan tree and spotted a plow, in the distance.

“Does Zurg control the machinery here?”

“What? Of course not,” said Pinny, idly. Buzz took off, running for the plow.

“Hey!” the aliens shouted in sudden fear, but he had no time for their hesitance. The plow would be out of reach if he didn’t catch up with it, but it had been so close - so much closer than this run suggested -

He paused, realizing how far he’d run, that the shouts behind him were increasing, and the mountain next to him avalanched.

He was washed to the side in a wave of garbage as a plow too huge to be usable by any known life form knocked the mountain over, then backed up to gather more of the garbage. Half-buried in the landslide, Buzz wrenched and twisted to free himself, and got free just in time to run, but a falling half-shattered ceramic vessel struck him on the back, probably further damaging his jetpack and he -

\- it was day. _It was day,_ suddenly, and it had been the dark of sunset a moment ago. The noise of the plow to Buzz’s right made him bolt for his life, and he kept running even as the noise of the plows faded, until he heard the familiar voices of the other toys -

“Thank goodness, we thought you’d run right into the incinerator,” Savannah Steve said.

“What time is it?” Buzz demanded. “It was night just a second ago -”

“Oh, did we get the Sensible Buzz back?” Wizbot asked.

Buzz looked at the three, then the sky in panic.

“Please tell me I didn’t go beyond infinity again,” he begged.

“Oh gosh!” Savannah Steve ran over. Buzz took an alarmed step back. The last thing he remembered was Steve, gripping the rim of his spacesuit. “Do you remember us?”

“Don’t shake him again!” Pinny warned.

“Chutes and Ladders,” Buzz exhaled, putting his head in his hands. “The whole night? I lost a whole night?”

“Yes, but you’re back now,” Wizbot said, circling him and stroking his wire beard as if this were merely a curiosity, and not a terrible ordeal that was causing Jessie to be locked in the dark even longer than she had to be. “I am intrigued by the mystery of your faulty neurology - if any of us can be said to have neurological components -”

“It’s fine to have a ‘real’ Space Ranger around for a night,” Steve said, airquoting, trying to be helpful. “We appreciated not having to convince you to stand watch.”

It was the airquotes that did Buzz in. He dropped to his knees, head in his hands.

He knew he was giving in to panic. The fake academy training he still, against all logic, remembered told him that giving in to panic just invited more panic as one slid down the slope of stress hormones, but what good was it to try to thwart neurochemistry? He didn’t actually have a brain producing neurochemicals to thwart.

A real space ranger wouldn’t be here to have a panic attack at all. Not just because a real space ranger would be a person, with rights among all the planets of all the galaxy, working weapons and navigational equipment. A real space ranger would do everything Buzz failed to do that would have prevented any of this from happening - _a real space ranger would have hid in the closet with Jessie when Mom came tidying._

“If I’d acted like a real Space Ranger back in Verdi, I wouldn’t even be here, and Jessie wouldn’t be trapped,” he burst out. “I knew it was time to hide but I didn’t -” the groan wrenched out of him with fury like he hadn’t felt in ages. He’d known it was time to go. He had _known_ it and he hadn’t _done_ it and now Jessie was suffering, because he had failed to be a Space Ranger when it would have saved her for him to have acted like one. Now he was acting like one in such a way that could get him _and_ these other toys killed.

He turned back to them, breath coming fast. “I appreciate all your help, but you would all be safer if you weren’t with me,” he admitted. “The Ranger could get you killed too easily.”

“We’re not going to abandon you,” Pinny said, grimly, annoyed even as she said it.

“Not with your quest at stake,” Savannah Steve agreed. “Of course a true knight would try to do this quest alone, but we -”

Buzz found he had, very suddenly, had enough of Savannah Steve’s attachment to his story. “Stop!” Buzz held his hand up. “Just - stop that,” he said, trying his best to contain his frustration to a clear command, not a snap. “I’m not a knight,” he said. Before Savannah Steve voiced the objection he was about to make, Buzz went on, “ _I’m not._ I’m just a toy trying to get back to someone who - who makes being a toy worthwhile. That’s all I am and that’s all I want to stay but -” he clenched his fists, suddenly more frustrated, suddenly more overwhelmed than he’d been in ages. “ _Why_ is this happening?”

“Why, indeed, does anything happen?” Wizbot mused. “The _why_ has a different answer for every person that asks it. Some will point to karma, while some will -”

Buzz’s temper frayed through. “I didn’t ask for a philosophy lecture!” he snapped.

“Don’t yell at him!” Pinny snapped back.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Steve said, his voice suddenly vulnerable. “I just think -”

“You think it’s a wonderful story, I know,” Buzz said, keeping his temper in check. “But it’s not a story, it’s my life, and you only know the fraction of it that -” _you only know the fraction of it that doesn’t make me look like entirely a deluded fool, the fraction that doesn’t tell you I can’t save anyone, I can’t help anyone, I make the wrong choices that land Jessie in her worst nightmare and me in a nightmare I never anticipated, I wake up a blank slate ready to believe the first order I hear even if it’s against every true friend I’ve ever had -_

“- shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.” Steve had gone on talking, and Buzz was only now zoning in for it. “Just because you slip out of it doesn’t mean that the choices you’re making aren’t noble -”

“I put her in prison, all right?” The confession burst out of him.

The other toys fell silent. Buzz let out his sigh.

“You keep calling the wrong toy noble,” he said. “The last time I was the Ranger, I proved I’m not.”

The toys waited, none speaking, for the rest of the story.

Buzz sighed.

“My room had been donated to a daycare. A Lotso Huggin’ bear was running the place, putting all the new toys in with the little kids without rotating them to prevent breakage. I figured there’d been a mistake and that he’d be reasonable so I went to negotiate -”

And why had he thought that Lotso would be reasonable, that putting the new toys in the Caterpillar room had been anything but deliberate? There were his instincts again, being wrong. Why did he only ever follow them when they were wrong?

“. . . I don’t remember what he did, but he got the Ranger, and I don’t know what he told him but I do know that I accepted whatever lie he told me. I put Jessie in prison for him. I just took his word for it that she was the enemy. She hates the dark, she hates small spaces, and I put her in one, and got angry at her instead of believing her when she was scared and in danger -”

And he’d been so angry when she had said she was his friend, because even in his delusion she was just the prettiest toy he’d ever seen, and now that he knew what having a full life was, the emptiness of his Ranger existence as a friendless hero so focused on the mission that he didn’t even remember his address on the Capitol Planet stung. It stung for the Ranger to hear someone he naturally wanted to know as much as Jessie insisting they were friends, when he believed that was a lie she mocked him with. When all the while the person making his life lonelier was him, by being so gullible as to believe the first bear who spoke to him in authoritative tone, and not his own instincts that said he wanted to hear every word Jessie had to say -

“A true knight wouldn’t do that,” he said. He paused, but couldn’t honestly stop himself from adding - “Apparently a Space Ranger would. Since I did.”

He stood up. “You’re all safer without me around. It’s a good thing the emperor here is a Zurg, because that’s the only toy you can expect the Ranger not to trust.”

“Hold on, the Emperor isn’t a Zurg,” Pinny cut in.

No? “Then you’re definitely safer without me around,” Buzz said. “Who knows what the Ranger will believe if an authority figure tells him the right lies? I could end up putting you all in the Emperor’s custody.” He had to consider the training he still, somehow, remembered from an academy he’d never been to. Space Rangers were not trained to gently subdue their prisoners. “Or worse.”

“Yes, and.” Wizbot cut in, so forcefully that Buzz looked over his shoulder. “That means you’ve got to figure out why you keep losing your mind, and then getting it back again.”

“We can help you do that,” Steve insisted, ever hopeful.

“You’re not going to be any good to your cowgirl if you get stuck as the Space Case,” Pinny agreed, though her grim expression still said that really shouldn’t be her problem.

Buzz looked at the toys. Whether he stayed with them or not, he was in danger of losing his own life and Jessie’s hope of rescue. He was a danger to them too, and the fact that they weren’t immediately shunning him for it in this environment of struggle was braver and kinder than they owed a near stranger.

He hated to think too closely on Sunnyside. Just approaching those memories made him feel as if he were still, in some way, in them, still feeling a helpless terror of the unknown that he hadn’t felt since he first accepted that he wasn’t a person, and never had been. But he owed it to these toys to work through that panic. And Jessie needed him to.

He sat down on an overturned plastic pudding cup and walked himself through the last memories before his break from reality in Sunnyside.

“How they - got the Ranger,” he said, thinking. He’d followed Ken - “I followed one of their henchmen into a hideout. They caught me eavesdropping. They tied me down -”

Things got fuzzy at this point. He had already been outraged and indignant. He hadn’t been panicked yet.

“They untied me when Lotso came in.” Yes, that had happened. “I tried to negotiate for my toys.” It hadn’t worked because Lotso had never had any intention of letting his toys leave Sunnyside any way but in a garbage bag. “It didn’t work. I - I think they strapped me back down -”

He must have been restrained. He would have escaped otherwise. He would have fought his way out surely? He’d been so focused on escape at that point - had this been in the vending machine still? How had Lotso even known to -

He closed his eyes. The anger of the moment, and his rising fury at being made to feel so helpless, threatened to overwhelm him. It was the worst he’d felt since finding out he had no life. And yet he had to keep looking directly at it because - 

_“It was filed under Lightyear.”_

Something had landed in front of him -

“They had my manual,” Buzz realized. He looked up from the worst time he could remember, practically fleeing the memory with this first shred of direction. “They had my user manual!” He jumped up. “Whatever they did, they figured out how to do it by reading my user manual -” he breathed fast through the residual panic. “Where am I going to find a whole Buzz Lightyear manual?”

“It might not be as hard as you think,” said Wizbot. “I saw a Lightyear box just last week. Thrown out without even being opened.”

Buzz winced.

“No offense, but everything has a sales peak, and from what I can gather your model was fairly overstocked,” Wizbot clarified. Buzz thought of Mom saying “We have five of this same space toy just gathering dust on the shelves,” the entire aisle of Buzzes in Al’s Toy Barn. “This landfill is likely full of manuals.”

Boy, did that paint a dark picture. “I’ve got to find one,” he said. “It’s the only way to figure out how I can stop being a danger to myself and everyone else.”

“My guys are not going that close to Emperor territory,” Pinny stated. Steve opened his mouth to plead, but Pinny’s look silenced him. “But - we’ll keep watch for you at the perimeters,” she amended. Steve brightened, and even Wizbot’s beard stroking suddenly seemed more upbeat.

Buzz nodded, glad to have her support, even if it were minimal. “When do you think we should go looking?”

“Afternoon.” Pinny looked over the mountains of trash, a stray breeze rustling the fabric pages of her book. “Right now that landfill is covered with plows primed to shove us all in the fire. When the sun is over that peak -” she pointed to one mountain, a rounder hill than the others on the west ridge, “the landfill workers clock out for the day. That’s just enough time to scope some new garbage out, if the troops are moving in a convenient pattern.”

Buzz frowned at the amount of extra time that would put Jessie in storage. The human workday couldn’t be rushed. If he were caught, Jessie would be in storage far longer than just another day. He patted the kragle looped to his waist with the twist-tie. “Until then, maybe there’s a little more of this lying around,” he suggested.

“This is so exciting,” Savannah Steve said, as they journeyed along the outer wall, eyes out for plows, the dog, or the troops Buzz really hadn’t heard enough about yet.

“To hope for something, even someone else’s success, is invigorating after all these years of monotonous survival,” Wizbot agreed.

“You’re all such saps,” Pinny sighed, but she didn’t halt their progress along the landfill’s outer rim.

****

The afternoon brought long shadows to hide in. During the day’s search Pinny lead the group by one of their small caches of useful items. They each took a piece of broken signal mirror, doubling as a sharp edge, and made their way dangerously close to the entrance of the landfill.

“The dog’s the biggest threat for the next hour,” Pinny informed Buzz. “Once the sun sets the troops will be on the move, but they avoid the front gate unless the Bear is with them.”

“The -” Buzz started to ask, then decided he didn’t want to know just yet. “Got it. Signal with the mirror if you see it. I’ll come back before sunset,” he promised.

He tucked his piece of signaling mirror under the rim of his space suit, where the glass bit into his rubber inner layer and wedged firmly in place against his hard plastic exterior. Buzz jogged around the intact bags of the day’s household garbage, towards the front gate where the last landfill worker was clocking out. Buzz paused as the man stopped at the doghouse and chain post by the front gate, gave the rottweiler a pat before unchaining it for the night, and locked the chain link gate behind him. The dog watched the man climb into his truck, then trotted off south. 

Buzz hurried around the garbage, pausing at each hill to check for any movement that could have been Emperor troops or the dog, eyes wide for the blue and white box that would have the answers he needed.

The sun dipped lower as he scavenged, not seeing any signs of a big box store’s overstock tossed. The Bulk Mart probably didn’t throw out overstock every day, and his heart sank a little at the thought of the possible whole week he’d have to search to find the information he’d need to get back to Jessie. He eyed the chain link fence as he peeked into pile after pile of garbage, none of it appearing to have come from a toy store. 

The dog was absent. He could climb that fence and be out in the desert in seconds, back on his way to Jessie. Time he lost looking for the manual was time he lost on the way back to her.

But if he slipped back into Space Ranger mode while on the 50 mile stretch to Verdi, who knew where the Ranger would get him lost before he came back to himself? He could get himself run over accidentally. What if the Ranger learned the truth of being a toy again, without any context that he had a life worth getting back to? He could become another Buzz Statistic, like the one from Savannah Steve’s library, smashed to pieces underneath a truck in despair for the life he didn’t have, never knowing that he had someone to get home to. Jessie really would be stuck in the dark then.

The danger of his memory lapses was too great. Buzz turned away from the fence, glanced at Jessie’s ribbon tied around his wrist, and longed to hear her voice and see her smile again. He hadn’t been apart from Jessie this long in twenty years. He had never wanted to be apart from her any length of time. 

He renewed his search as the sun touched the mountain peak. The overhead lights of the dump flashed on, and Buzz remembered his promise to be back to the other toys by sunset. He’d barely begun to search at all, he felt, but -

\- but a mirror flash from a pile of black bags to the north caught his eye, and he froze in place, listening.

A faint, jeering laugh wafted over the heaps of garbage. Buzz ducked under a couch that had been dumped in the afternoon, flat on the ground to peer under the couch’s skirt, looking for movement.

He didn’t see movement. He saw something else - the blue and white that was so familiar that he could barely believe his luck.

Buzz emerged from underneath the couch quietly, excitement building as he recognized the empty box. Yes, it was mostly intact, ripped open to release the toy inside, but still closed in on -

He pushed the spaceship box open and found it. A manual. Fully intact. He dragged the cumbersome book out of the box and looked over his shoulder. 

The mirror still flashed, increasing in speed and urgency, stopping suddenly as the noise from the west rose in a shout of discovery. More voices joined, the roar of a hunting party that had found prey.

Buzz looked at the manual, pained. There wasn’t time to even open it. He took off running, ducked under the couch and left the manual underneath it. He could come back and retrieve it, provided the dump didn’t hurry to incinerate the couch - it was a long shot but the jeering laughter was louder now as he ran for the next trash heap.

A band of toys, all marked with a black slash diagonally spray painted across their torsos, emerged beyond a garbage bag heap. They walked without the quiet caution of the Pinnacle Princess’s band, laughing and darkly jovial as they walked. Buzz recognized a Copperhead Captain, an Uruk Hai, half a dozen tiny plastic ninjas that had probably all come from the same prize bubble machine. An Exceptional Man action figure walked with them, bearing the same black stripe, but the superhero action figure trudged dead-eyed and sad-faced, the only one among his companions not laughing at the quarry they had contained between them -

Wizbot. Buzz looked over his shoulder at the trash heap where the mirror flash had been most frantic. Savannah Steve and Pinny crouched atop it, looking desperately horrified.  
Buzz looked back as the Uruk Hai, wielding an actual pocket knife like a sword, poked Wizbot in the back hard enough to scratch his plastic. They’d already cut the tip off the wizard’s wire beard, and his dim red eyes and fixed grim smile somehow still radiated fear and despair.

Buzz ran for a battered plastic stepstool by another pile of black garbage bags. He launched himself atop the stepstool and pulled the tube of kragle off his twist tie belt. He held it up in the air. “Hey! Shambling sellouts!” he shouted, in his best Big Important Ranger Man voice.

The black-banded toys all looked his way. Even the dead-eyed Exceptional Man looked surprised to see him. 

“A space ranger!” shouted the Copperhead Captain.

“He’s got kragle!” the orc shouted. The ninjas bolted in a triangle formation at him.

Buzz jumped down from the stepstool, behind the garbage bags. They’d expect him to run. Maybe half the raiding band would follow him. The others would keep Wizbot pinned down while their compatriots subdued him.

He waited until he could hear the ninjas, climbing over and racing around the bags, dispersed by the obstacle, and he ran past them instead.

The ninjas shouted in alarm at missing their quarry, and the three action figures turned their attention from Wizbot to face Buzz. A mason jar lid on the ground caught Buzz’s eye. He flipped it up with his toe and caught it, tackling the Uruk Hai with his full mass behind the jar lid, plowing the super orc prone. Buzz rolled smoothly to his feet, safely between Wizbot and the action figures.

“Get out of here,” he ordered Wizbot, who didn’t have to be told twice. The wizard bolted. Buzz threw the jar lid at Copperhead Captain as the Combat Carl nemesis lunged for Wizbot. The jar lid connected, stunning the captain back a few steps, and Buzz saw the ninjas running after Wizbot, catching easily up to the awkward robot toy.

He ducked just in time to avoid Exceptional Man’s Exceptional Fists, and sprinted past the dazed Captain right under the Uruk Hai’s swiping reach. “Hey! Bubble buddies!” he shouted at the running ninjas. 

Each tiny toy warrior stopped in its tracks. “What did you call us, you impudent imbicile?” the lead ninja shouted.

Buzz held up the kragle. “Go long!” he commanded, throwing the kragle as far as he could opposite the way Wizbot had run, into the depths of the garbage piles.

“Don’t let him distract you,” the ninja leader shouted at his brothers. “Get the wiz -”

“NO you IDIOTS!” thundered the Uruk Hai, announcing his arrival just in time. Buzz dodged his swipe with the pocket knife, crouching to defend himself, trying to get inside the Uruk Hai’s center of gravity to disarm him. “Get the kragle before one of his little friends retrieves it!”

The ninjas disappeared into the garbage pile, Wizbot forgotten. Buzz would have breathed a sigh of relief, if he weren’t dodging swipes from a live blade.

He turned to run, but Exceptional Man and Copperhead Captain had him triangulated. Copperhead Captain wielded the mason jar lid now. Buzz launched for Exceptional Man - maybe the dead-eyed action figure, clearly resenting the job he’d found himself in, would let him pass. But no, Exceptional Man grabbed him in an Exceptional Headlock. Buzz stepped back, pushing Exceptional Man’s foot out of balance and taking the action figure’s full weight on his back. He tipped forward, flipping and slamming the action figure on the ground, but when he was face up and Exceptional Man was stunned beneath him, Copperhead Captain brought the jarlid down on his forehead. The sound of a clapper toy filled the air. The Uruk Hai was waving the hand-shaped parry noisemaker back and forth when Buzz looked up, and no sooner did he identify the noisemaker than he suddenly felt arms wrapping around him - and wrapping around him - and wrapping -

“Bout time you showed up,” the Uruk Hai grunted to the Stretch Armstrong that had Buzz in an unbreakable bind. Nothing in Buzz’s fake academy training had prepared him to get out of the absolute envelopment of a stretchy toy whose arms were perpetually stretched out. 

He squirmed for any give, and only heard Stretch growl at the Uruk Hai. “Sorry, I thought you all could take care of yourselves against one Space Ranger without me to babysit you,” he mocked, as Exceptional Man silently put his head in his hands and Copperhead Captain smacked Buzz in the head with the jar lid again.

And again. The villain toy was angry even by villain toy standards. Buzz waited as the pain slowly faded, assessing himself - memories, identity still intact, he looked around. The ninjas were on their way back, no sign of Wizbot, Steve, or the princess. Buzz noted with some grim satisfaction that they hadn’t found the kragle either.

“Whatever!” exclaimed the Uruk Hai. “Lets get this one in before it causes any more trouble.”

“Where are you taking me?” Buzz demanded. Copperhead Captain just smacked him with the jar lid again.

****

The grim march through the darkening landfill was long, and it was fully night by the time Buzz saw the massive tire mountain. The one the survivor toys had advised him to turn back from the moment he saw. He understood, seeing the massive pile, why this was the safe zone that most of the toys clung to. Shredded and stained soft toys peered out from the network of rings as the Emperor’s troops marched Buzz past, their big black or jewel toned eyes somehow seeming haunted even past their eternally cute exteriors. Dolls with wild, unbrushed hair and shredded fashion attire hid as the troops marched past, other battered action figures - mainly of villain-origin toys, but with a few heroes as dead-eyed as Exceptional Man - walked the empty space around the Tire Mountain more freely than the more gently made toys.

The troops marched Buzz to a rusted out car, two Battlesaurs sitting on the lid. One held a metal spatula that had been sharpened to a cutting edge, the other an equally sharp ice pick, and both had nets twist tied to their waists. Stretch unwrapped Buzz just enough that he couldn’t escape easily, and the Battlesaur guards jumped down to the Toyota’s rusted bumper.

“Admit one,” the Uruk Hai ordered. He held up his fist for the ice-pick wielding battlesaur to bump. “How’s it going, Jeffrey?”

“Oh you know, can’t complain,” said Jeffrey the Battlesaur, untying the rope that held the car’s trunk down to the car’s trailer hitch. In a seamless movement, Copperhead Captain and Exceptional Man grabbed Buzz by his arms and lifted him slightly off the ground, Stretch released him, and the battlesaurs lifted the car trunk enough for Copperhead Captain and Exceptional Man to throw Buzz in. He landed and rolled just in time to see the last crescent of light vanish as the car lid slammed down.

It had all happened so fast. The manual, freeing Wizbot, and now he was captured - captured by a tyrant in a desolate, ruined land, every step he had taken that day somehow taking him farther from Jessie than he had ever been.

Buzz turned away from the closed lid, staring blankly in the dim glow cast by the light his spacesuit’s glow in the dark panels had managed to soak up from the landfill’s night lighting. He looked up into the faces of his fellow captives.

His _many_ fellow captives.

His _many identical_ fellow Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger captives.


	5. To Have a Life, Then To Have No Life At All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again everybody! Sorry for the long time between updates. Several deadlines crept up on me and, well, it is the year it is, and I was feeling no bueno. But things are calmer now and I’m in a better mood and happy to share this next chapter with you. This chapter’s title is from Plastic Spaceman, by Randy Newman.

Chapter 5  
To Have A Life, Then To Have No Life At All

Jessie had never had a problem making herself heard before, but at the end of what must have been the night, all she’d accomplished was a sore throat and an exhausted heart. She’d called and called for help, but neither Mom or Dad seemed to have heard her. Or what they had heard, they’d decided to ignore.

Panic rose again as Jessie wondered how long she’d already been in the box. It hadn’t been long, in the grand scheme of how much time she could expect to be in the box. Bonnie’s year in Sanfran had barely started. She might take another gap year before college. She might go straight to college without taking anything from home, and that was four years Jessie would go without knowing. Any number of years could pass while Bonnie lived her life and decided to or not to have kids and Jessie went on in the dark, in the small, hot and suffocating and constricted and blind and - and -

No one was going to come and free her. She could only keep trying to free herself.

“Jessie doesn’t give up,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse. She curled up again, pressing her feet against the lid and pushing. “Jessie finds a way -” she pushed. “Jessie finds away -” pushed harder. “Jessie finds -”

She went on chanting. She went on pushing.

The box, and the dark, went on bearing down on her.

****

The other space rangers looked at their new prison companion with varying levels of disinterest. They were all heavily damaged, missing paint, deeply cut, long out of the box. They’d been here a while.

“So,” Buzz said, when none of them announced themselves, or greeted him as a fellow Space Ranger. “Who knows they’re a toy?”

The Buzz to his right tackled him so suddenly that he had no defense planned.

“Void Agent!” the other toy yelled at him in his own voice. “Keep your lies to yourself! No Space Ranger worth his fusion cells will ever break under your deception!”

There was such a panicked edge to the other toy’s voice that Buzz immediately realized - this wasn’t the confident disregard of a true believer, but the desperate denial of a toy who wasn’t ready to accept the truth.

“Well, you’ve convinced me,” he said, holding his hands up, all but rolling his eyes. “How wrong was I, lesson learned.”

“Don’t forget it,” the other Buzz said, letting him up. The angry ranger shot him a glare before returning to the left side of the trunk to lean against the wall. Two other Buzzes looked at the one who’d laid him out with approval, but their approval was dull-eyed. If they still believed their own delusion, they’d been here too long to have the energy to get worked up about it. Only one Lightyear sat alone on a tire iron and looked away without an approving nod to the ranger defending his personhood.

Buzz stood back up. In the quiet dark, his situation truly washed over him. He was a captive, of someone who’d left Savannah Steve one-armed, and kept the toys of the landfill either firmly in his thrall, or terrified to fall into it.  
What was their imprisonment for? To prevent them from rebelling? Buzz racked his brains for other clues he’d picked up from Pinny and her crew. The Emperor was not a Zurg, but went hardest on Space Rangers - what did _went hardest_ mean?

He had minimal information on his captor. He had unreliable potential allies in the collection of delusional space rangers. He had so little information he didn’t even know what further questions to ask.

_What would Woody do?_

The question bubbled up when no others did. It had been more than a decade since he’d seen Woody, but they’d shared the occasional email correspondence, the rare times Woody and Bo had been able to sneak into an internet cafe or a library or an uninhabited trailer on their carnival journeys over the continent. Buzz had had the means to send them far more emails than they’d been able to respond to, sneaking often onto Bonnie’s laptop once she got one, but even the scant correspondence had been comforting and consistent.

Buzz pictured Woody there in the dark of the car trunk with him, reunited after years of only the occasional fragment of a letter. Woody, with all his years of wisdom and cunning gleaned from leading an ever shifting body of vastly different toys through the uncertainty and danger of life as a child’s plaything. Ready to apply all that experience to this new scenario as a captive of a tyrant in a desolate landfill.

The Woody in Buzz’s imagination freaked out.

“We’re trapped! Trapped by a crazy tyrant in a desolate landfill!” The Woody of Buzz’s imagination shrieked.

 _That sure is an assessment of the situation,_ Buzz thought, continuing the mental exercise as he imagined Woody hypverventilating, even though neither of them needed to breathe, tugging down each side of the brim of his ten gram hat.

“Buzz, we gotta get out of here,” Woody would say. He’d rush at the trunk lid and strain against its unyielding barrier. He’d try a few different lifting positions before collapsing, limp and defeated, but leap up again to try -

\- kicking at the tail lights. Buzz glanced at them. He remembered seeing chicken wire stapled over the lights from the outside, so kicking out the glass (or plastic) would only open a hole for the wind to blow through.

Imaginary Woody continued his panicked inventory of the trunk, bashing himself against anything that seemed however improbably like it might be breakable, then tucking his head between his knees and hyperventilating when none of it was. There would be a period of sobbing with despair. There’d be some false reassurances that this was fine, this was okay, they’d been in worse scrapes then this - there would be howling to the dark and unyielding trunk that _no they never had been_ \- sprinkle in some rocking back and forth on the floor in horror, and yes, that was just about what Woody would do.

Buzz actually smiled. He was glad Woody wasn’t a captive of a tyrant in a landfill, but somehow, he still wished so much that the real cowboy was there to have this panic attack in person, so he didn’t have to just imagine it.

What Woody would do - eventually - was settle down, once the panic was out of his system. He’d take careful stock of the situation. They weren’t going to bash their way out. They weren’t going to reason with an evil emperor.

Buzz had to get free, find the manual, get out of the landfill, and back to Verdi, but thinking about all of those at once was only paralyzing him. Woody would focus on the first part of the problem. Woody would come up with a plan to escape the trunk.

That meant assessing the others in the dark with him. The ranger that tackled him upon arrival might know the truth, but he wasn’t willing to accept it. The two others seemed deluded still.

And then there was the fourth. The only one that hadn’t telegraphed his approval of the first’s attack when Buzz had first asked who knew they were a toy.

That ranger sat alone on a tire iron, picking at the edge of his air monitor decal. He stared at the floor of the trunk with a dead-eyed stare that Buzz recognized from the outside.

Maybe that was how he’d looked to Woody, when he’d been strapped to the rocket at Sid’s. Maybe that was how he’d looked when he’d needed to be talked out of giving in to despair, and had the good luck to have Woody nearby to talk him out of it.

Buzz made his way to the other toy.

“So,” he said, quietly, sitting next to his doppelganger. “You figured it out.”

The space ranger looked at him with a brief flash of desperate relief at being understood. He kept his voice low. “Don’t let the other guy hear you say it.” He nodded towards the ranger that had tackled Buzz on entry. “He’s running out of justifications, but he’s driving himself crazier hanging on to the ones he has.”

Buzz nodded. “And the others?”

“Can’t even talk to them,” the despairing toy spat. “Anything I say that isn’t ‘hail Star Command’ goes in one ear and out the other.” He snorted. “Or would if they had ears.”

Why was that? Buzz narrowed his eyes, looking from the lucid toy to the oblivious rangers, deep in some private discussion while the one in denial faced the wall of the trunk, swaying slightly like an elephant in a too-small pen.

It had taken so much, when he was in a comfortable house, surrounded by other toys, being pulled into Andy’s vivid imaginings, to convince him that he was a toy as well. In contrast this landfill, this desperate hostage situation with nonfunctioning tech, fit the Space Ranger lore too well for them to question themselves within it easily. A tyrant ruling a trash planet was probably at least one episode of the Buzz Lightyear saturday morning cartoon. No wonder they weren’t figuring out the truth, or if they had, resisted it so hard.

“What did it for you?” Buzz asked the other.

“I don’t know.” The depressed toy plucked at his decal again. “One day it was just all too much to deny,” he said, staring into the dark of the floor. “I’d been in the Blue Hole too long without no sign of rescue, and it just . . . didn’t make sense anymore, that I’d never noticed half the gear was just stickers -”

He sounded so lost and afraid as he said it. But the words “Blue Hole” shook something in Buzz’s memory. Savannah Steve had mentioned it once - how last time he’d gotten near the Blue Hole, he had two arms.

“What’s the Blue Hole?” he asked.

The other Buzz just looked at him with a despair too overwhelmed for explanation. “You’ll find out,” he muttered.

“How long since you got unboxed?”

His depressed counterpart shrugged. “Early winter. Never knew what store actually threw us all out.”

Post-holiday overstock. Buzz winced. “That’s a rough way to come here.”

The other Buzz shrugged. “What _isn’t_ rough about it, no matter how we got here? How long since you figured it out?”

"About 24 years.”

“Twenty -” The other Buzz - the Buzz who was basically six months old - looked astonished. “You’ve been around for 24 years?”

“I got lucky -” Buzz started to say, when the car suddenly shook. Light filled the trunk.

Someone had pulled the center console of the car’s backseat open. A Parasaurolophus battlesaur and a xenomorph marched into the trunk each holding a fork. The tines looked deliberately sharpened. Two orc action figures stood at the open center console behind them.

One held a lighter. The other held a firework.

“New Buzz,” the xenomorph said. She pointed at Buzz. “Come through.”

Buzz hesitated. The orc with the lighter flicked the ignition wheel suggestively.

“They will do it,” the other space ranger whispered to him. “There’s thousands of us in other trunks. If they have to blow a few of us up to quell a new guy’s spirit, they will.”

Buzz didn’t want to ask how he knew. “We’ll talk when I get back,” he assured the other Buzz.

Already, the depressed space ranger looked just intrigued enough by this exchange to want to keep it going. A little shred of hope – even if it was just for understanding – was in his face. Buzz marched up to the two fork wielders, who poked at his soft-molded midriff, herding him into the body of the car.

Once he was out of the trunk, the fire-guards tossed their explosive and lighter to opposite sides of the backseat. They shut the center console and rolled a bowling ball into place to hold it closed. While the orcs were distracted and only the xenomorph and battlesaur had him in their sights, Buzz spun, tried to grab the xenomorph’s fork, but the battlesaur smacked him upside the head and the orcs pinned him to the seat. He felt the sharp tines of a fork at the back of his neck.

“The new ones always have some get-up-and-go,” the battlesaur chuckled. “All that fancy Academy training.”

The xenomorph snickered. “Save it for the arena, space hero,” she advised. 

“Arena?” Buzz repeated, as the two orcs hoisted him to his feet, frogmarching him across a two-by four bridge to the dashboard of the car. Artificial light gleamed through the broken windshield. “What arena -”

The guards carried him through the broken windshield, down the hood of the car, and kicked him the rest of the way - into the Blue Hole.

The Blue Hole was an aboveground pool, surrounded by rusted out cars and rimmed with rusted barbed wire. Broken glass had been glued around the inside rim in downward-facing shards, slick and almost impossible to climb. The glass shards glittered in the light of hundreds of flashlights mounted on the cars, and a few energized headlights - some blindingly bright, but each dimming as the minimal power from their salvaged batteries flickered.

Atop the cars jeered a vast crowd of spectators, shouting and stamping their feet on the car roofs and hoods surrounding the hole.

There were so many in the audience. Soft toys and dolls intermingled with action figures, all with their voices raised as they aimed their flashlights at Buzz. He turned away from the blinding lights and saw the floor of the pool littered with . . . with weapons. Chopstick staffs and plastic hairsticks mixed with kitchen implements and broken tools, rusting knives, and even a hatchet on the other side of the . . .

Buzz choked back his shock. _The gladiatorial arena._ He recognized the purpose of this place. It was like the battlesaurs arena, blown up to a scale that supported real violence.

“Citizens of the Carson City Landfill!” a voice rose over the shouting of the crowd in an accent that was very California by way of New York. “Be most bodaciously welcome to another evening of carnage, of slaughter, of radical action beyond your wildest imagining!”

Several toys were strung up on broken tennis rackets and mounted on the cars surrounding the Blue Hole, unmistakably prisoners. One of them had a megaphone taped near enough to his mouth that his totally tubular voice rang over the roaring crowd. Buzz recognized the green action figure at a distance by his 90’s vocabulary and the orange stripe of his mask. A Michelangelo the Ninja Turtle was this place’s prisoner, but also, apparently, its sportscaster.

“Are you ready! For some forcible entertainment?” Mikey hollered into the megaphone.

The crowd roared in the affirmative.

Buzz spotted a scalpel not far from his right boot. He cautiously leaned over and picked it up.

“Then raise your voices,” shouted Sportscaster Mikey, “for your one, your only, your purveyor of pastimes, your diversion dictator, the ruler of all refuse, your - Void Lord!”

The crowd picked up the title as a chant. Every eye was fixed on the husk of a rusted-out RV, looming over the ring, hood upholding a set of cinderblock steps down from the broken window of the over-cabin bunk.

A toy stepped out of the window.

Buzz blinked a few times, unable to believe what he initially saw. The figure descended the cinderblock steps, his white hooded cloak stainless in a way that suggested enormous care and lots of salvaged near-empty bottles of bleach. It implied his hoarded junkyard wealth as starkly as it outlined the emperor’s unsettling appearance, forcing Buzz to accept that the Void Lord was called that for a reason.

He was a black as a void. There was no exaggeration in the title. Inside the stark outline of the white cloak, his shape was a darkness so deep that no detail of the toy’s make and model could be discerned. The Void Lord raised his hand and even against the night sky his arm was like a hole in the universe, like nothingness walking around in a white cloak.

No children’s toy had been made that way. He must have been painted, with a uniquely black paint so dark it absorbed light, and then still thrown out to rot. Where he had, instead, flourished.

Two attendant Uruk Hai guards accompanied the Void Lord down to his lego throne on the RV’s hood. The Void Lord stood, accepting the roar of the crowd, until his open hand closed in a fist and the crowd quieted in expectation. The Void Lord sat, and his guards remained at attention with their steak knives. He waved a hole-in-the-world hand at Mikey, and the ninja turtle began his commentary again.

“Tonight! A brand new Space Ranger faces his first doom on Earth,” Mikey shouted into the megaphone. To Buzz’s surprise, the assembled toys boo’d him on description. “Will he succumb to the arena? Or will he survive to fight another night?”

“Survive?” Buzz echoed. Pinny’s terror of the emperor’s territory and Steve’s one-armedness sank in, the stakes becoming as clear to him as the Void Lord’s features were not. Toys really died here. For no reason but that another toy had decided they should, and somehow convinced others to support him in making it so. The absurdity of his captivity threatened to overwhelm him.

“It’s kill! Or be killed!” Mikey shouted. Buzz’s grip tightened on his scalpel, but in a horror that had nothing to do with defending himself. He had no interest in killing anyone, any more than he had interest in dying. He wouldn’t do either. He would talk to whatever opponent they dropped into the ring with him, make him see sense that there was no reason either of them had to fight at all, much less to the death, for the whims of some emptiness-painted lunatic. “Tonight! For the first time! And maybe the last!” the crowd raised its voice in an amused, entertained roaring laugh. “Another Spaceman lives or dies at ground-level!”

Two battlesaurs dragged a cardboard box out through the broken windshield of a Chrysler. The box shuddered between them as a third battlesaur ripped the duct tape keeping whatever was inside from exploding outward, and the battlesaurs kicked a box full of junkyard rat into the ring.

If Buzz had a stomach it would have dropped. The rat, scrawny and starved and wild-eyed with anger, hissed at the only moving thing it saw within reach. 

The rat flew at Buzz.

“What do you think, folks, will he go for the laser first?” Mikey mocked. The crowd roared with laughter. “Or will he try to fly out?”

Buzz sidestepped the rat and fended off its swipe with the backside of the scalpel blade. The rat clawed at him in a fury, but knicked one of its paws on the scalpel blade. It paused to catch its breath, flanks heaving, as Buzz backstepped slowly.

“Well, color me surprised, my dudes! This one’s decided to keep it low tech! Some of that good old-school pugilism they teach at the Academy, right Lightyear?” The crowd cracked up as if this were simply hysterical, while the rat lunged another swipe at Buzz. “Don’t answer that, you seem busy man, keep going.”

The rat was already nursing its cut claw, and its washboard ribs and obvious hunger filled Buzz with pity. It was hard for him to imagine what starvation felt like. It was hard for him to imagine pain of an injury that didn’t fade just about immediately after being noticed, but the creature was so clearly suffering. He didn’t have to know what its suffering felt like not to want to cause it any more, especially not when the sort of toys that delighted in watching others suffer were screaming for it.

Buzz flipped the scalpel around so that the blunt end was towards the rat and held his ground. The rat dodged his first jab, foaming and shrieking, but his second swipe knocked its right paw, sending it skittering back from the pain. Buzz scanned the rim of the arena. There had to be something he could do other than put an end to this animal’s suffering in a permanent way.

“Looks like this ranger is a friend to the animals! A unique take! What do we say to that, dudes?”

The crowd took up a chant, roaring, “Kill or Be Killed, Kill or Be Killed!”

Light gleamed on the broken glass and the layer upon layer of barbed wire glued to the rim of the pool. The rat hissed, the crowd roared, and Buzz watched its lashing tail, waiting for the stilling that signaled a jump.

Just past the rat’s lashing tail, he saw what he’d hoped to find. A fraction of the rim where the glass didn’t gleam quite as brightly.

He flipped the scalpel around.

“That’s what I’m talking about! That’s what you all come here for! Some real - genuine - bloodshed! Who’s ready?”

The crowd roared its approval.

The rat’s tail stilled. It leaped. Buzz ducked and rolled under it, rising into a sprint, spinning the scalpel again and using it to pole vault up to a bit of rim where an unbarbed section of wire dangled just enough to, maybe -

\- yes, to grab, and tug it down a little way. Buzz brought the scalpel blade up in a hard strike, glass shattering under his first blow, the rusted wire losing another five inches of grip on the rim and dropping him closer to the ground on his second. He reached up again and smashed more glass, opening up a gap for his desperate opponent.

The rat spotted the opening. It had had enough of pain, and scurried towards the exit. But it couldn’t pole vault, and as Buzz sagged lower on the descending wire, the rat climbed him, scratching his plastic on its way up the wire to grip the edge. The crowd roared its disapproval. The last shove from the rat’s hind claws broke Buzz’s grip on the wire, and he saw its tail vanish over the edge as he fell, bouncing hard on his battery pack. The world suddenly as dark as the Void Lord.

****

Space Ranger Lightyear awoke to a raging crowd and at least a dozen spotlights pointing straight at him. He wiped the dust from his face and stood up, taking stock of the wall around him, the spiked wire fencing him in, the blue ground strewn with the detritus of battle.

He flipped open his arm panel, voice uncharacteristically shaking as he made his entry. “Mission log - I’ve awoken in some kind of gladiatorial arena, with no idea how I’ve gotten here -”

“Hey Spaceman, no chance to phone home now,” called an amplified voice. “Who knew there was an Option 3 to Kill or Be Killed?”

Buzz looked up and saw captives strung up by their wrists and ankles, suspended in rings around the arena. One served as an announcer. This treatment of the prisoners was already an appalling crime, but it was more important just then to control his revulsion and figure out who was responsible -

There. A cloaked figure on a rough-hewn throne. Buzz’s breath caught in his throat as he tried to pick out the overlord’s features, and failed to. The depths of the overlord’s cloak were darker than the depths of space, darker than the center of the blackest black hole.

The emperor stood, lifting his closed fist.

“What judgement awaits the old-school Ranger?” the announcer-prisoner called out. “Will the Void Lord permit him to live to surprise us again? Or is Kill Or Be Killed the rule by which we, again, live or die?”

It had been years since Buzz’s track and variable-gravity field days at the Academy, but even so, as he lined up his javelin, his form was perfect as it had been then. 

His throw was unimpeachable.

The Void Lord caught the javelin in midair.

A startled gasp ran through the crowd. Silence fell for the first time since Buzz had awoken from hypersleep.

“OH SNAP, dudes!” the prisoner allotted the megaphone broke the silence. “Everybody saw that, right?”

The Void Lord dropped the javelin. It clattered to the hood of the broken-down spacefreighter upon which his rude throne was mounted. The guards to his sides looked at the dropped weapon, to their lord, and to each other with expressions of increasing panic.

Buzz felt pity for them. In failing to rebel against their slave lord he had probably doomed both of them to terrible punishment. But it was likely they’d had a choice in their positions - at their emperor’s side, or in this arena, and Buzz reigned his pity for them in. They’d made choices that had brought them close enough to execute a slaver, but they had not done it. Foolish of him, though, to have used the javelin simply because it was at hand, when he could have ended this in a moment with his laser.

He lifted his laser and tuned up his settings to fire the executioner’s blow.

A net fell on him. Two guards leaped from the rim of the arena to subdue him. He’d missed his chance.

“Never have I seen such an outrageous feat of futility!” the announcer called, real shock and a frantic note in his voice. “For a Space Ranger to attack our Void Lord with anything but a glorified laser pointer is beyond my wildest imagining! What a shock! What an astonishment! Tis a show I cannot look away from, my dudes! Now tremble as your Void Lord gives judgement! Will this old-school curiosity linger to astonish us with new impudence? Or will the Void Lord relegate him to the final void of death?”

The Void Lord raised his empty fist. The crowd fell silent with anticipation.

The Void Lord turned his open palm upwards. The crowd erupted with wild cheers.

“The old-school ranger lives to fight another day! And maybe another rat,” the prisoner-announcer shouted. “You want excitement? You want surprise? You want to know what it is to feel alive without life? The Void Lord gives all this and more! Yet again, your Void Lord provides!”

“Void Lord provides!” the crowd took up the chant. “Void Lord provides! Void Lord provides -”

The guards pinned Buzz’s arms behind him. One cuffed his wrists and threw the net aside, then helped his fellow hoist Buzz back up to his feet. 

“Unhand me!” Buzz protested, as guards atop the hood of a defunct spacecraft dropped a bucket on a rope into the blue arena and his captors frog-marched him to the lift. “This event is in violation of the Galactic Convention for Sentient Rights. This quadrant is within Star Command jurisdiction! You are all complicit -”

The guards felt no need to respond. He wondered if he could even be heard over the roaring of the crowd as they lifted him back onto the space freighter, marched him through the wrecked interior, and tossed him into the dark cargo hold.

His spacesuit lit up automatically to counter the dark. He wrenched against his cuffs, but they didn’t give. Footsteps behind him raised his alarm, but it settled back down as someone loosened his bonds.

“I’ve almost got the twist-tie off.” 

Buzz calmed down as his fellow captive picked the lock on his cuffs. Free again, he sat up and was half-relieved, half-disappointed to see the cargo-hold-turned-prison-cell full of other Space Rangers.

“Good work, Ranger,” he congratulated the lockpick. A quick glance told him that the others had been here too long. Two sat on the ground, looking at him with the mild disinterest that came from despair, while another simply stood with his head to a wall.

Only the lockpick seemed to have any life left in him. He checked the ranger’s nametape and almost laughed. It wasn’t as though “Lightyear” was a common last name, but if he could awake at the tail end of a gladiatorial battle he didn’t even remember fighting, he could meet another space ranger in a backplanet jail with his family name.

“Now will someone PLEASE tell me what’s going on?” he demanded, standing to face the sorry bunch of rangers. Certainly their suffering must have been great. Star Command didn’t allow quitters to train long enough to wear their uniforms, yet every ranger aside from the lockpick seemed sapped of all willpower. “I’m supposed to be on autopilot through Sector 82 of the Patterson Quadrant right now, but instead, I find myself in a rural tyrant’s deathmatch.” He racked his own memory and was surprised not to come up with an answer to his next question. “How far have you already gotten in the protocol for this situation?”

Actually, now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure they had protocol for this. Oh well. More for him to add to the regulations, once he’d gotten back to the Capitol -

“Are you kidding me?”

The lockpicking Lightyear’s expression had changed to one of sheer disappointment.

“What happened to _figuring it out?_ You said we were gonna talk about it when you got back!”

“What are you talking about?” Buzz asked, to the other ranger’s sudden fury. “I’ve never met you before in my life.”

He dodged the other ranger’s sudden lunge, but against his expectations, the ranger grabbed his boot and glanced at the sole, instead of trying to strike him.

“You said you figured it out 24 years ago. You said - ! Augh!” The ranger dropped Buzz’s boot, throwing his hands up in the air in fury. “Why did I get my hopes up? Of course I can’t have _just one full conversation_ with someone sane. Of course not! Not in my life! Not ever!”

The desolation of captivity had obviously driven the ranger mad. Buzz made his way over to the other two, still calmly seated.

“Maybe you two can deliver a better brief,” he suggested.

“You know as much as we do,” the ranger to his left said, disappointing him slightly. “We were all in hypersleep when we awoke on this planet.”

“The local tyrant’s done something to disable all our suit tech,” the second added. “No flight, no lasers, no communications.” He glanced to the furious lockpick, now sitting by himself. “It’s driven that one out of his mind.”

The first ranger shrugged a shoulder to the one who hadn’t spoken, who stood staring at the wall. “He’s trying to hold it together, but he might not be far behind.”

Buzz rubbed his chin. “Don’t despair, men. We’ll get out of this somehow,” he assured them.

He couldn’t see a way out yet, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.

The other two looked at each other, though, clearly unconvinced, their expressions full of defeat.

“We were saying the same thing half a year ago,” the first ranger said. “It’s going to take more than current protocol to get out of this situation.

Half a year was a long time to be a prisoner in a violent slaver’s entertainment retinue. Buzz couldn’t criticize their despair, in that context.

He could just renew his intention to save them from it. One way or another.

The Void Lord had gotten lucky. He'd captured many rangers, even a Lightyear. But he had never captured Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger before.

He left the other two rangers to get his thoughts in order. He leaned against a wall of the containment cell, inspecting his tech and finding it, as the other rangers had warned, completely nonfunctional. His air monitor was even entirely missing, his helmet broken, remnants of whatever crash had dislodged his arrival from his memory.

The only thing he paused over was the yellow ribbon tied around his wrist.

He touched the soft cotton, stained with dirt and slightly loose after his arena battle. It didn’t look like anything he’d have picked up for himself. It looked like something a lady would wear - someone lovely and far beyond the refuse he found himself mired in now.

He couldn’t remember crashing here. He couldn’t remember tying the ribbon around his wrist any more than he could remember who’d worn it first.

A sudden surge of desire rose in him to know who would give him something that looked so much like it belonged on someone else. Someone someone he very much wished he could see in his mind’s eye.

He tightened the ribbon and glanced up. The lockpick who’d lost his faith was looking at him. Buzz suppressed a sudden surge of embarrassment at having been caught gazing at something that made him feel so irrationally sentimental. Thankfully, the disoriented ranger said nothing, just looked away and back into his own private ponderings, leaving Buzz to stare into the gloom as the light from his suit faded, passing them all into darkness.

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Just in case it wasn’t clear from his intro, the Void Lord is painted with a light-absorbing black paint like Black 2.0 from Culture Hustle, hence his supernaturally voidlike appearance. And yes we will learn how and why, in time. ;)
> 
> I joked with my friends while planning this story that it's Toy Story 5 But Mad Max, and now we are finally getting to our Thunderdome vibes!


End file.
